Voiceless

Back in 1998, young, hip hotshot writer Steve Glass wrote a story for The New Republic that was quickly revealed to be a fake. Like many tales of writers who committed the ultimate journalistic sin, the one that might be worse than plagiarism, i.e. out and out fabrication, looking back it seems laughable that it was believed at all. (I don’t know if fabrication is worse than plagiarism. We can all agree, though, that plagiarizing a fabricated story would be pretty much as bad as it can get.)

Glass’ story, titled “Hack Heaven,” featured a 15-year-old hacker holding a company hostage. He had hacked into their computer network, see, and now the company wanted to hire him to prevent further attacks. According to Glass, it was cheaper for the company to just hire him to fix their database rather than go to the police.

This was so common that “900 recreational hackers were hired in the last four years by companies they once targeted.” There was even an agent who represented 300 hackers and brokered such deals. Nevada even ran public service announcements on the radio saying “Would you hire a shoplifter to watch the cash register? Please don’t deal with hackers.”

If this sounds outlandish, it’s because it’s all false. An internal investigation by The New Republic revealed 27 of 41 of Glass’ articles contained fabrications, and the magazine wasn’t so sure about those other 14, either. Looking back, it seems laughable that 900 hackers could have been hired in four years and no one had heard of it until Glass uncovered the story. It makes you wonder just what in the hell the editors were thinking running the story. Didn’t any of this raise a red flag? (Glass who had previously worked as a TNR’s fact-checker, covered his tracks fairly well, going as far as to create a fake web page for the fictional company held hostage by the 15-year-old.)

The larger question, and the one I’m most interested in, though, is: How did Glass think he wasn’t going to get caught? I sort of understand how it works. You fabricate something once, nobody catches it; you make up two things next time. Then it snowballs: three, then four, and pretty soon you have fictional 15-year-old hackers holding fictional companies hostage.

But, still. All it would take would be one, say, Nevada law-enforcement official to see the story and realize that no such PSAs ever aired (or one Forbes Digital reporter, Adam Penenberg, who exposed the hoax, looking into the story after initially thinking he had been scooped).

I bring up Glass — who was once an editor at my college newspaper — because of the revelation yesterday that Nick Sylvester, another young, hip, talented writer, fabricated at least one part of his Village Voice cover story this week. The Voice’s editor’s note says the final part of Sylvester’s story — which you can still read online via the magic of caching (it’s an engaging read) — contained a meeting Sylvester had with three TV writers that did not so much happen.

The article was about Neil Strauss’ book The Game and how New York City women were catching on to the tactics of PUAs, or pick-up artists, in the book. When Metro interviewed Strauss back in September of last year and detailed the slang used by PUAs, I called bullshit on it. Of course, I was doing it in a joking manner, since I haven’t read the book. Either way, though, the story Strauss tells is clearly very over the top, and so it seems at least at first glance like he exaggerated things.

But he didn’t, as far as I know, combine separate conversations into one meeting which never happened. I understand the pressure of a cover story for an alt-weekly. When I did my piece on Charlie Manuel last August, I quoted him telling a story where he cursed repeatedly. I could see seeing that anecdote and feeling kind of like I maybe made it up, or exaggerated it, or something. I didn’t. In addition to just, you know, being someone who doesn’t make up stories, if I had made it up somebody would have found out. (Also, I’m really not clever enough to invent situations. I need things to actually happen.)

And that’s the thing that confuses me. The fabrications of Glass and Sylvester — and it’s probably a little unfair to compare them, but whatever, it’s easy, and they both have Philly connections (Sylvester went to the Prep) — are more disappointing than anything. As a big fan of his writing in the Voice and on Pitchfork, I just wonder why he’d do something like that. Glass was a talented writer, too, so it seems just like more of a waste than anything else. Is the temptation to make things up to tie a story together neater so great that they outweigh consequences of being suspended, fired, humiliated or whatever else could happen.

I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever know. This story will probably get discussed as (1) another example of how the media can’t be trusted and (2) another reason why blogs are the greatest source of news and commentary, like, ever. Even back when Glass wrote his piece, there were discussions: What if an online magazine had made this mistake? And I agree, the Internet isn’t quite as scary and unfettered as some would make it out to be. But this is more like the mistake of one person (or, one newspaper) and could happen just as easily online. It’s good to have a healthy distrust of the media — and I don’t mean conservative/liberal bias, thank God, but more of a realization that each reporter can have a different take on a situation — and I fear that this issue (and others like it) of people making shit up are mere outliers and discussing the real problems with American media is eschewed in favor of the easier, sexier story. Hey, kind of like the media.

It’s all confusing. But from this whole situation I can take two things: One, I think PW’s fact-checkers would have caught this. (Of course I can’t write this thing without some shameless self-promotion. What do you expect?) And, two, I totally need to get The Game and study up before the girls here catch on, too. I mean, even though we’re the Sixth Borough, it still takes a little while for NYC trends to catch on down here, right? Didn’t it take us like two years to get those cool cabs with the sports tickers on top of them?