On September 4, 2003, Rolling Stone magazine published an article by Stephen Glass.
Yes, that Stephen Glass.
By 2003 Glass had become one of the most notorious fraudsters in the hostly of journalism. He had outright made up dozens of articles he published in The New Republic in the 1990s. He had been the subject of a 2003 movie Shattered Glass starring Hayden Christensen, who depicted Glass as a mentally unstable pathological liar who got stories greenly by editors who found his tall tales too entertaining – and anti-Republican – to turn down.
And yet, after all of that, Rolling Stone decided to publish Glass. “Canada’s Pot Revolution” ran in September 2003.
The unbelievable, demented chutzpa of Rolling Stone platforming Glass after all that brings to mind the case of Jake Tapper. Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper are publishing a book on May 20: Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. As everyone knows, old videos have resurfaced of Tapper defending Biden in the 2020 election cycle. When President Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, criticized Biden zombie appearances in his campaign, Tapper wrote on Twitter that it is “worth reading this remarkable piece about his stutter.” Tapper was shamelessly covering for Biden, who clearly has dementia. Now Tapper is trying to play Woodward and Bernstein and hawking a book exposing the very lies he helped perpetrate. On X, journalist Mollie Hemingway repented the response to Tapper: “The mother bleeping AUDACITY of you to do this after running 24-7 interference on behalf of him and mocking and attacking every single person who noticed Biden’s decline. The MOTHER. BUH-LEEP-ING. AUDACITY. Have you no decency? Have you NO shame?”
He does not. This is why, even decades after the fact, Stephen Glass remains such a compelling journalistic figure and a totem rather than a villain for liberal journalists. They have adopted Glass’s strategy of lying to cover lies and then adding lies, except unlike Glass they – with good reason – think they can now get away with it. Their colleagues will protect them. Part of what is so mesmerizing about the film Shattered Glass is that even when caught, Glass just keeps digging himself in deeper, compounding lies with more lies and yet still more lies. What makes things different all these years later is that the media is now so irredeemably corrupt that Glass may get away with it today – and even be promoted.
I recently called out what I believe is an obvious case of Glassian fraud by a transgender journalist named Jamie Hood. Hood’s book Trauma Plot recounts a series of rapes that Hood allegedly suffered over the course of two years. I found the stories unbelievable, and contacted NPR, The Atlantic and other places that had interviewed Hood, flagging the questionable stories. No one responded. (I would offer to do a fair assessment of Tapper’s book, but he’s angry at the review I gave his last novel, All the Demons are Here. He even DM’d me to gripe about me “trashing my new book.” I thought I gave his book an honest review – even if CNN tried to trash me.)
In such an environment, were there is no honor and lies can actually help your career, Tapper is going to hang on, hire a crisis pr firm, and try and snake his way through. The strategy is to get his book on the bestseller list even if they have to play fast and loose to do it. It only takes sales of a few thousand copies of a book to land on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s also a curated list, which means that liberal editors manipulate who gets on there. Brian Stelter’s 2023 Network of Lies only sold a few thousand copies and was on the list for a week. Stelter will be grabbing his ankles for the Tapper promotional train for sure – as will the Washington Post, New York Times, and the legacy media.
Recently in The Free Press, Joe Nocera noted that we are still living with Stephen Glass. “There’s no excusing what Glass did,” Nocenta wrote. “As a young staff writer at The New Republic in the mid-1990s, Glass wrote some 42 stories that were either partly or wholly made up. When he was drummed out of the profession, I applauded. What’s hard to fathom is why, of all the journalistic fraudsters over the past decades, his is the story that just won’t go away. It’s been told in Vanity Fair, and in the 2003 movie Shattered Glass. When The New Republic celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2014, it sent Hanna Rosin, once a close friend, to interview Glass and retell the sordid tale. Just last year, Washingtonian magazine ran an “oral history” of the making of Shattered Glass.”
Nocenta thinks this is too much: “Enough already.”
Sorry, as long as Jake Tapper won’t come clean and people like Jamie Hood tell tall tales that are published by places that know better, there’s plenty of room left in this Glass.
