Stephen Glass is known for his highly fabricated stories that were published under the magazine The New Republic. Ironically, it was his piece titled “Hackers Haven” that set in motion the investigation that would get associate editor Stephen Glass fired and create his own circle of Hell. “Hackers Haven” was a piece that Glass wrote about teenage hackers that would extort money from corporations such as Jukt Electronics. Nearly all of Glass’ piece was unable to be verified by the writers at Forbes Digital Tool. As it came to light through the investigative work in Adam Penenberg’s article, Stephen Glass made up the entire story. The company Jukt Electronics that hired the hackers was non-existent, as was the hackers association, the PSAs, government associations, and even laws were all imagined by the writer in order to get another story on the page. What is more, “Hackers Haven” was not Stephen Glass’ only piece that was a work of his brilliant imagination. After further investigation on the part of The New Republic, they found that twenty-seven out of his forty-one bylines had been fabricated. Glass was well liked around the office, he would lend an ear to his co-workers and came off as incredibly non-threatening. After the incident, his friend and colleague Hanna Rosin said in an article she wrote titled “Hello, My Name is Stephen Glass and I’m Sorry” that, “Steve had a way of inspiring loyalty, not jealousy, in his fellow young writers, which was remarkable given how spectacularly successful he’d been in such a short time”. His friends’ and co-workers’ love and trust that kept him safe from speculation…although I’m sure the fake letterheads, memos, faxes, phone numbers, and notes certainly helped.
As great of a storyteller Stephen Glass is, he is not one of a kind. There were fabulists printed as news before him and have been since. While it would be ideal that the case of Stephen Glass is an aberration, this type of #FakeNews happens more than people would like to think. Most recently would be the case of the columnist Kevin Cullen who is currently on administrative leave from the Boston Globe. On April 19th, Kyle Daluz wrote a piece for the WEEI network after its morning show host Kirk Minihane of “Kirk and Callahan”, confirmed that contrary to Cullen’s piece, he was not at the scene of the bombings during the 2013 Boston Marathon. Daluz’s article shows that Kevin Cullen’s column had been detailing false accounts of the Boston Marathon Bombing that were written in his column piece “Five years later, we feel the grief like a sixth sense” as well as in a BBC phone interview. Similarly to Glass, Cullen one of the ways in which he gets away with fabricating his pieces is by citing sources using only their first names. Thus making them unverifiable. Slightly different from Glass, Cullen starts with a true event and spices it up by embellishing certain details. Within the Boston Globe alone there are other cases of writers who also presented fiction as truth such as Mike Barnicle, Patricia Smith, and Jayson Blair. It is possible the journalists embellish a story through little white lies every day. News Consumers like to get news that is exciting and plays with their emotions. There is news coming out every second of every day through news apps and Twitter, journalists must feel the pressure to churn out a piece that will make them stand out. Taking that into consideration, while Stephen Glass and Kevin Cullen’s deception is by no means acceptable, it is easy to see where they are coming from in the age of New Media. These fake accounts are not the first time that this sort of thing has happened, and it certainly will not be the last.