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.

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