Stephen Glass (journalist)

Stephen Glass (* 1972 in Highland Park , Illinois ) is an American author and former journalist who was at the center of a high-profile counterfeiting scandal.

Career

Glass was born into a Jewish family. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania . In 1993 he was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper Daily Pennsylvanian . In 1994 he dropped out of law school to join The New Republic's editorial board and freelance work for Rolling Stone , George, and Harper’s magazines .

He was popular with his colleagues, stood out for his quick New Journalism style and rose to Associate Editor of The New Republic, although doubts about the solidity of his articles had already arisen and complaints about his articles were mounting. In May 1998 his career as a counterfeiter was exposed. The article Hack Heaven was about a young hacker , portrayed as infantile and greedy for money , who broke into the computer network of a company called Jukt Micronics after being hired as a security expert. The journalist Adam Penenberg from the online edition of Forbes Magazine researched the facts and became suspicious when he could not find the company Jukt Micronics, whose website had also been faked by Glass in an amateurish manner. The given telephone number of the company, on which one could only hear an answering machine, also turned out to be his brother's private line. Glass initially claimed to have been deceived. His editor-in-chief then drove him to the original site of a hacker congress described in the article, and it turned out that the convention center was closed on the day in question.

After his release in 1998, the magazine announced that Stephen Glass had forged several articles that had appeared in The New Republic (27 of 41 articles were in doubt).

Stephen Glass graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University and wrote an autobiographical novel. In 2003 the story was made into a film by Stephen Glass under the title Shattered Glass .

He worked as a paralegal in California and was denied a license to practice law in California due to his history as a forger, most recently in a decision by the California Supreme Court (2011). He had previously been refused admission to the bar in New York in 2000 due to his history as a forger.

Individual evidence

1. ^ The New Republic, The Editors: To our readers, June 1, 1998 ( Memento of December 1, 1998 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ Glass: The fabulist , Simon and Schuster., 2003