Who knows what Stephen Glass was thinking when he submitted "Hack Heaven" to The New Republic but neglected to tell his fellow editors that the story about a 15-year-old supercracker, an "even more adolescent version of Bill Gates," was a complete work of fiction.
Did Glass, himself just 25, believe or merely hope that nobody would scratch beneath the surface of his fabulous portrait of Ian Restil, whose agent -- described as a "superagent to supernerds" -- won him a big-money contract with the firm he had hacked?
Did Glass' heavy workload -- an associate editorship at The New Republic, countless freelance writing gigs, and night law school -- drive him to concoct a story so brazenly that he even invented a law enforcement agency (the Center for Interstate Online Investigations) and a proposed law (the Uniform Computer Security Act)? Or had he just plain lost his mind?
No matter. Young Mr. Glass is out of a job, fired by The New Republic for his transgressions. But with his sterling journalistic fakery, which even Janet Cooke would have to label a creative marvel, Glass now wears the crown New Media Hero.
Yes, it is a bit self-serving for online publications to take this angle on the Glass story: To hold it up as shining proof that just as there's nothing inherently trustworthy about work that appears in established publications that use ink and paper to disseminate their ideas, there's nothing inherently untrustworthy about publications that use bits and browsers.
And yet, why not? The lesson is both valid and necessary, and the way the whole affair came down, there's almost no other place to go with it. Anyway, if media traditionalists are going to point to Matt Drudge as the embodiment of online journalism, can't online folks point to "Hack Heaven" and say, "People who print Glass articles shouldn't throw stones"?
"I feel strongly that we've been dissed by traditional media so often, maybe this whole incident will show that we deserve some respect," said Adam Penenberg, the Forbes Digital Tool editor who uncovered Glass' fabrication. "We've always had to be better than print because if we weren't, then people would say, 'Well, that's the Internet, can't trust it.' So yeah, I'm definitely hopeful that this will cause people to rethink how they view things."
If this won't, then nothing will.
Here we had Forbes Digital Tool -- a publication that appears on the wild-and-woolly Internet, where you can't tell your Vonnegut from your Schmich and you darn well better be skeptical about everything you read -- unearthing a shocking tale of reportorial fraud in an 84-year-old journal of liberal ideas, a publication so influential in the nation's capital that it refers to itself as the "In-flight magazine of Air Force One."
And in the first of many ironies the incident offers, the Forbes team got its story by doing a lot of good-old-fashioned journalism, the kind that newspaper editors have too often suggested the Net lacks. Penenberg, shocked that he had been scooped by a political magazine on a hacker story, searched databases for background on the company Glass had conjured, called government offices, checked telephone directories, and made inquiries to numerous law enforcement agencies. The online crew -- not The New Republic's editors -- did the work.
Not that everyone was ready to give it credit. When The Washington Post ran a story on the fraud in its Monday editions, it took superstar media critic Howard Kurtz until the 11th paragraph to credit Forbes Digital Tool, and even then he said merely that The New Republic editor Charles Lane "began his investigation after receiving inquiries from a reporter for the Web site of Forbes magazine." (Well, actually, it was an editor and the publication is called Forbes Digital Tool, both of which Kurtz would have known had he put in a call to Penenberg before rushing his story into print.)
As it happened, the online exposé was up at midnight Sunday, and it had a lot more juice than the Post's Monday-morning version. For instance, it was online where we learned that after the Digital Tool inquired about the company named in The New Republic piece, "Glass enlisted the aid of his brother and used the latter's cell phone as the phone number for 'Jukt Micronics.' In addition, Glass concocted a fake corporate site for 'Jukt Micronics' on America Online, as well as phony voice and email accounts for all his sources."
Great stuff -- and great because Forbes Digital Tool took such care in preparing and pursuing the story. But Penenberg knew they had to: Hacker stories, which print media have taken in hand time and time again to whip up fear-of-technology sentiment, are notoriously dicey.
"They're really hard stories to do," Penenberg said. "You have to double- and triple-check everything, because there's so much scamming going on."
So Penenberg, after concluding that Jukt Micronics didn't exist, did more digging to determine if Glass had been a hoax victim or a hoax perpetrator.
"We knew last week that there was some kind of hoax," he said. "We had the story and could have posted it last week. But we wanted to nail it completely. So it's kind of ironic that whereas everybody always says online publications are too quick to rush things onto their site, we waited just to make sure."
Unanswered in all of this is how The New Republic could have been so credulous. "There are so many questions that as an editor, you had to be asking right when you saw that story," Penenberg said. "Where is this company located? Is it public or private? And on and on. I mean, the phony law-enforcement agency.... To me, what happened there isn't a matter of fact-checking screwing up. It goes way beyond that."
New Republiceditor Lane told the Associated Press that Glass produced handwritten notes -- apparently fabricated -- to get the story past fact-checkers. "If a man is willing to forge notes, it's kind of hard for fact-checking to catch it," Lane said.
But this isn't the first time the magazine has been burned. In 1995, The New Republic apologized after writer Ruth Shalit was twice accused of plagiarism. Wouldn't you think it would be extra careful? Moreover, Lane told The New York Times that The New Republic had in the past received letters to the editor challenging Glass' work, but Glass "always had an explanation."
"An explanation." It's no substitute for rigorous editing.
