BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Stephen Glass and second
chances. The normally reliable Globe columnist
Cathy
Young made a whopper
yesterday, and she did it in service of a dubious argument: that
former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was given more
chances to screw up than a white reporter would have because he is
black.
Her example: Stephen Glass, who
left the New Republic in 1998 after it was revealed that he
had extensively fabricated people, organizations, universes,
you-name-it in his feature stories over the previous few years. Young
writes:
No one says that Blair
lied and plagiarized because he is black, only that an obsession
with diversity may have helped him get away with it. Glass was
promptly investigated and fired after the first alarm signals;
Blair got promoted despite an editor's memo urging his
dismissal.
Wrong. In August 1998, the
Washington Post's Howard Kurtz offered up this tidbit about
how one of Glass's editors, the late Michael Kelly, reacted when
Glass's integrity was challenged:
Stephen Glass, the New
Republic staffer fired for serial fabrications, once wrote a
piece savaging Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the
Public Interest. Jacobson was depicted as a fastidious eater,
zealot and hype artist in attacking such products as Olestra, the
fake fat made by Procter & Gamble.
Now Vanity Fair reports
that Michael Kelly, the New Republic's editor at the time
of the now-retracted piece, fired off a letter after Jacobson
complained: "Mr. Jacobson, you lied, and you lied because lying
supported your thesis, and you attempted to cover up your lie....
I await your apology to Stephen Glass and this magazine."
"Never in my life have I gotten
a letter with the kind of vitriol Kelly was spewing out," Jacobson
said. "He was defending an indefensible position, as was
subsequently shown to be the case with the unmasking of Stephen
Glass. "
Kelly says he was responding to
an "outrageous" news release from Jacobson's group accusing the
New Republic of mimicking other newspaper articles in "a
larger, industry-backed smear campaign to undermine CSPI's
credibility."
The Glass article in question
appeared in TNR in December 1996. He was allowed to keep
falsifying for more than a year after that.
posted at 8:47 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
