ГУЛаг Палестины - Лев Гунин

rarely held accountable, and that only egregious lying over a protracted interval

eventually risks discovery and exposure. Had Stephen Glass been just a little less

of a liar, had he more often tempered his lies, more often redirected them from the

powerful to the powerless, he would today not only still be working as a reporter,

but winning prizes. Thus, the example of Stephen Glass serves to demonstrate the

viability of the hypothesis that misinformation and disinformation in the media is

widespread, and that the three examples mentioned above, and the many more documented

throughout the Ukrainian Archive, may not be exceptional deviations at all, but

rather the tip of an iceberg in an industry which is largely unregulated, which is

largely lacking internal mechanisms of quality control, which is responsive not to

truth, but to the dictates of ruling forces.

Another question which may be asked is whether Stephen Glass is the product of some

sub-culture which condones or encourages lying, or which even offers training in

lying.

The following excerpts, then, are from Buzz Bissinger, Shattered Glass, Vanity Fair,

September, 1998, pp. 176-190. The quoted portions are in gray boxes; the headings in

navy blue, however, have been introduced in the UKAR posting, and were not in the

original. I now present to you Stephen Glass largely on the possibility that our new

understanding of Stephen Glass will deepen our existing understanding of other

record-breaking, media-manipulating liars that have been featured on the Ukrainian

Archive, ones such as Yaakov Bleich, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon

Wiesenthal.

One precondition of exceptional lying may be an intellectual mediocrity which puts a

low ceiling on the success that can be achieved through licit means. Thus, Stephen

Glass, although performing well in high school, began to perform poorly in University,

and when he began work as a reporter, was discovered to not know how to write:

Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical

curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But

then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed

another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track,

or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine.

Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of

study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall

grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished - slightly less than a B.

"His shit wasn't always as together as everyone thought it was," said Matthew

Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior.

There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well

academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. "He always said he was doing fine,

doing fine," said Klein. (pp. 185-186)

Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing. His

original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. (p. 186)

A second precondition of exceptional lying may be growing up in a subculture which

encourages lying, or merely condones it, or at least does not actively work to

suppress it. The Bissinger article offers us next to no information on this topic, except

for the following brief statement:

Harvard educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot spent a good deal of time at Highland

Park High School researching her 1983 book, The Good High School: Portraits of

Character and Culture. She was impressed with the school's stunning academic

programs but noted that values such as character and morality were sometimes

little more than brushstrokes against the relentlessness of achievement. (p. 185)

The first steps on the path to high achievement in lying will, of course, be timid and

cautious, but when the lack of repercussions is discovered, will become bolder:

At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were

melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add

the edge Kelly seemed to adore. But in the March 31, 1997, issue of The New

Republic, Glass raised the stakes with a report about the Conservative Political

Action Conference. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason

and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot. They went looking for "the

ugliest and loneliest" woman they could find, lured her to their hotel room, and

sexually humiliated her. The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of

with reverence. Subsequent to it, Glass's work began to appear in George, Rolling

Stone, and Harper's.

But challenges to Glass's veracity followed. David A. Keene, chairman of the

American Conservative Union, called Glass "quite a fiction writer" and noted that

the description of the Omni Shoreham room littered with empty bottles from the

mini-bar had a problem. There were no mini-bars in any of the Omni's rooms. (p.

189)

The young liar next discovers, to his amazement, that the exposure, scandal, and

punishment that he feared do not materialize. Questions concerning the veracity of

his work can simply be brushed aside. The chief consequence of his lying is dizzying

success:

At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation's

capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic

to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories

- in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in

modern journalism. (p. 176)

Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had

seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at

Harper's, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones.

This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his

income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New

Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the

attention not just of Random House - his agent was trying to score a book deal

but of several screenwriters. (p. 180)

There arrives a time when the young liar begins to feel himself invincible. He finds

that no matter how big his lie, he is not exposed, and he extrapolates to imagine that

he leads a charmed life and that his good fortune will continue forever. In view of his

perceived impunity, he sees no need to moderate lying, and so he escalates it:

Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the

celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington

magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true

stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of

the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was

laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at

nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no

last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and

the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a

department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in

the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down

was himself.

He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going

beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and

memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance.

Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself.

"He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything," said

Chuck Lane. "He would have destroyed the magazine."

The saga of Stephen Glass is wrenching, shameful, and sad. His actions are

both destructive and self-destructive, and if there is an explanation for them,

his family has chosen not to offer it. Repeated attempts to interview Stephen

were rebuffed, and all his father, Jeffrey Glass, said in a phone conversation was

this: "There's a lot unsaid. You can do whatever you want to do. There's no

comment." (p. 182)

But the result of such a course, at least in some perhaps rare cases, is discovery and

discredit:

Nothing in Charles Lane's 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of

Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship

of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the

second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of

Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the

history of modern journalism was unraveling.

No one in Lane's experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of

Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot

rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn't just the relentlessness of the

young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that

Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the

daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle

ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted

kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the

lobby just seconds earlier - a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette.

(p. 176)

The New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its

editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined

pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period

between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of

George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass's

conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual

proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper's, Glass would

be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics,

which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified. (p. 180)

Post-mortems of how so much lying had succeeded in entering the media paint an

image of a cunning malefactor eluding stringent quality-control mechanisms.

However, perhaps it is the case that such post-mortems serve to delude the public

into imagining that Stephen Glass is a rare aberration, and not the tip of an iceberg.

Perhaps the reality is that right from the beginning any intelligent and critical superior

could have seen - had he wanted to - that Stephen Glass was a simple and

palpable fraud, and not the cunning genius depicted below:

For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated

audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because

of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup

materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact

checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he

presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written

with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that

never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake

mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if

they were doing their jobs. He wasn't, obviously, too lazy to report. He

apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than

mere truth offered. (p. 180)

HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1017 hits since 9Dec98

Jeffrey Goldberg Globe and Mail 6Feb93 Fabricating history

Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the

761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the

most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the

three men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.

McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the

761st."

The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 6, 1993, D2.

FILM FRAUD

The liberation

that wasn't

A PBS DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS A BLACK U.S. ARMY UNIT

FREED JEWISH INMATES FROM GERMAN CONCENTRATION

CAMPS. NICE STORY, BUT NOT TRUE, SAY THE SOLDIERS

BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG

THE NEW REPUBLIC

NEW YORK

It was a rare moment: Rev. Jesse Jackson, surrounded by white-haired Holocaust

survivors, embracing Leib Glanz, a bearded Hasidic rabbi, on the stage of the

Apollo Theater in Harlem. The occasion was a black-Jewish celebration of the

Liberators, the PBS documentary about all-black U.S. Army units that, according

to the film, helped capture Buchenwald and Dachau. The sponsors of the

screening, Time Warner and a host of rich and influential New Yorkers, billed

the film as an important tool in the rebuilding of a black-Jewish alliance.

But the display of brotherhood turned out to be illusory. The next night

Rabbi Glanz was nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim for the

transgression of consorting with Mr. Jackson. More significantly, the film's

backers and the press failed to point out that the unit featured most

prominently in the Liberators had no hand in the capture of either Dachau or

Buchenwald in Germany. "It's a lie. We were nowhere near these camps when

they were liberated," says E. G. McConnell, an original member of the 761st

Tank Battalion. He says he co-operated with the filmmakers until he came to

believe they were faking material.

Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the

761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the