A vegetable too far

Mark Steyn

Shattered Glass 12, selected cinemas

Ican remember the exact moment when I stopped reading Stephen Glass. It was June 1997 and he'd written the cover story for the New Republic — 'Peddling Poppy', about the ongoing attempt to rehabilitate the first President Bush. About half-adozen paragraphs in, Glass wrote:

Another good place at which to contemplate what is going on with Bush is the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ, which is a circuit church run by a handful of evangelicals who hold that Bush is the reincarnation of Christ Members wander from city to city holding services in public parks and civic halls and handing out leaflets on street corners. Inside the leaflets is a complicated genealogical web that purports to show that Bush is descended directly from the Messiah. The web is written in minuscule print with dozens of winding lines extending like varicose veins from circles within circles. The circles represent secret love children ...

Yes, well. It could be, I suppose. But then Glass went on:

Like many fringe religions, the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ is extremely regimented. Members adhere to strict dietary laws similar to Jewish kosher rules, but include other Bush-specific prohibitions. including one against broccoli.

At that point, I threw the magazine across the room and never read another Stephen Glass article. Bush, you'll recall, had sparked controversy — at least among those in the broccoli business — when he

said he couldn't stand the vegetable. But making it a dietary stricture for a Bush church was too neat a jest. If there was a real Bush church, it would take itself too seriously to riff off his broccoli gag. So that meant, I figured, that this First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ must be some self-consciously wacky group of tedious self-promoting jokers like the old Monster Raving Loony party, and Glass and his editors were trying to pass it off as a genuine phenomenon.

Instead, as was eventually revealed. Glass had made the whole thing up, and his editors had swallowed it, broccoli and all. A year later, halfway down the all-time great corrections column, wherein the New Republic announced the preliminary results of its exhaustive investigation into nearly 30 bogus stories Glass had written for them, there appeared this note:

In 'Peddling Poppy', Glass's account of a Hofstra University conference on the Bush presidency, The First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ'. 'Mary Ung' of the 'Committee for the Former President's Integrity', and 'a small skydiving industry newsletter' called Jump Now are invented.

You don't say. American magazines are notorious for their fact-checkers, but Glass's stories are fake at a more basic level than dates, names, places: they don't pass the smell test. Within his two-year meteoric rise and fall, certain themes recur: a church for George Bush, a shrine to Alan Greenspan, a woman who worships former presidential candidate Paul Tsongas ... All false.

And yet the New Republic got suckered by them every time. You can see why in Shattered Glass, Billy Ray's biopic of the famous fabulist (reviewed Arts, 15 May). The high point of Glass's life is not the published story but the editorial meeting at which he pitches his latest ideas. 'Where does he find these people?' marvels one adoring colleague. 'Unbelievable' says another. They're stories about young conservative activists, Christian talk radio, areas of life his fellow journalists have lit

tie direct experience of. But, happily, Glass's too-good-to-be-true anecdotes confirm their general worldview — young Republicans are drunken bullies, evangelicals are dopes and pushovers, etc. 'You have to know who you're writing for,' says Glass, and he does. Or as John Pilger remarked the other day, apropos the Mirror's fake army torture pies, 'They may not be true. But what they represent is true.' In other words, it's true because it fits my prejudices. Glass fit the prejudices of the New Republic, Har,ver's, George, Rolling Stone, and played smoothly on the reflexive condescension so much of the media have for so many of the American people.

But, of course, you can't make a film like that about American journalism. In most movies about a cocky young faker on the make — Catch Me If You Can, The Talented Mr Ripley — it's the phony who gets glamorised. Not here. Instead, it's the profession he has the impertinence to sully that gets imbued with a reverence that will strike any British hack as hilarious. Hayden Christensen plays Glass as a puppyish nerd in over-large specs. He appears about 25 when the picture starts and seems to lose a couple of years every ten minutes. By the end, he looks like Harry Potter all out of tricks.

But, when you're up against a sociopathic schoolboy like Glass, you need a hero. And slowly a film about Glass turns into a film about his editor, Charles Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), and his dogged determination to crack the case piece by painstaking piece. Imagine All The President's Men with Woodward investigating Bernstein and you'll get the general idea. Towards the end, there's a moment when Lane gets a vital piece of info and the final piece of the puzzle clicks into place, and you'd think you were watching Miss Marple.

The overwrought pun in the title, Shattered Glass, captures the tone of the picture. Glass has never seemed in the least bit shattered, but America's media ethics bores reckon they ought to feel shattered on his behalf. So Billy Ray frames the picture with a trip by Glass back to his old school to visit a class full of adoring journalism students — though this too may be another Glassy-eyed fantasy. And the whole media self-affirmation exercise comes together in a maudlin climax wherein we see the class applauding Glass for his statement of journalistic principles while simultaneously the staff of the New Republic applaud Lane for his robust defence of those principles, the two scenes being accompanied by Mychael Danna with the kind of weepy musical wallpaper that would seem excessive in a bona fide tragedy. Somewhere in heaven, Hecht and MacArthur, authors of The Front Page, must be laughing their heads off. Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair won't kill American journalism. But the absurd self-aggrandisement represented by this movie surely will.