Movie Review: "Shattered Glass"

Back in 1998, journalist Stephen Glass who was on staff at the illustrious political and literary magazine The New Republic got caught for fabricating, or "cooking," a plethora of articles for the magazine.

At the time I worked at The American Prospect magazine, a political magazine of a similar genre, and our office was consumed with the story for days.

The story shook the media world, and prompted a new debate about the importance of checking facts in journalistic articles.

Some people, including Tom Cruise who helped produce it, made a movie of the story, called "Shattered Glass", starring Hayden Christiensen, Peter Sarsgaard, and Chloey Sevigny.

The movie is an interesting look at the inside workings of a small political magazine. It switches between a scene of Glass looking dapper and acting suave, giving a talk at a high school class of aspiring journalists - mostly attractive young women. He imparts upon them his experience and describes the oh-so professional and thorough editing process at The New Republic.

The end result is sort of a mockery of the editing process, as we watch a newly appointed TNR editor and the staff at the magazine very slowly come to realize that Glass isn't just doing shoddy journalism or making up a little bit of his stories, but concocting them entirely from thin air. The movie kind of loses steam towards the end, as you wonder why editor Chuck Lane hasn't caught on to the dupe long before, when the editor and reporters at Forbes Digital are way ahead of him. Forbes Digital broke the story of Glass' fabrication of a story titled "Hack Heaven."

Probably the big hole in the film is that it doesn't cover the breaking of the Forbes Digital story and the reaction of the rest of the media community to this revelation that Glass snookered the once-touted "In-flight magazine of Air Force One" and other publications, with about three dozen fictional articles, printed as fact.

I'll rate Shattered Glass a 7/10.