Stephen Glass

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A screenshot of the webpage that Glass had created to try to prove his claim that Jukt Micronics existed.

Stephen Glass (born 1974) was an American reporter for The New Republic, who was fired for basing his articles on fake quotes, sources, and events. The story of Glass' downfall is told in the 2003 film Shattered Glass.

Glass went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian, the university's student newspaper. There his rise to Executive Editor was greatly facilitated by a series of exposés he wrote about the United Way and a "new journalism" piece he wrote about spending a night with homeless crack addicts near Penn's campus. He later obtained a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.

Following his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, he rose quickly to national prominence in the competitive world of political journalism, writing articles for The New Republic when he was only 23 years old. However, he would soon suffer a quick downfall.

[edit] New Republic scandal

Glass was fired from TNR in May 1998, after it was discovered that he had committed several cases of journalistic fraud. The story that triggered these events was called "Hack Heaven", and concerned a supposed 15-year-old computer hacker, who was purportedly hired to work for a large company as an information security consultant after breaking into their computer system and exposing its weaknesses. Like several of Stephen Glass's previous stories, "Hack Heaven" depicted events that were almost cinematic in their vividness and that were told from a first-person perspective implying Glass was there as the action took place.

[edit] Further reading

Glass, Stephen. The Fabulist (2003). ISBN 0-7432-2712-3
Very few of the articles that Glass wrote for The New Republic are still available online. Below are links to some of those articles which Glass is suspected of fabricating in part or in whole: