by Philo Gabriel

Created on: September 11, 2009   Last Updated: January 10, 2010

"Shattered Glass" is the nonfiction story of Stephen Glass, a rising star writer for "The New Republic" in the late 1990s, who, it turns out, habitually fabricated his stories out of whole cloth.

I have considerable familiarity with "The New Republic," though mostly from well before the time of these events. I was a subscriber for a decade or so, starting around 1980. It has been one of the most important and influential American journals of opinion for close to a century. It was consistently liberal for most of its history, then when it was bought by Martin Peretz - or really his rich wife, but he was put in charge - it gradually changed considerably. It became moderate to slightly liberal on average, but marked by various "shock" pieces from the far right, dropped in occasionally to, I guess, prove they were a bunch of mavericks who couldn't be pigeonholed ideologically. And on Israel, which is Peretz's pet issue, it took up a stance somewhere to the right of the Israeli far right, if such a thing is possible.

I was aware of the Glass scandal when it broke, but I didn't delve into it more than superficially. And I had long since stopped reading the magazine, so I hadn't read any of his articles.

One thing that really struck me in the movie - and it's interesting that they chose to highlight it by mentioning it in a graphic very early - is that the average age of the staff of the magazine was 26. I would have never guessed anything remotely that low. I mean, maybe for some new publication about the Internet or pop culture or something like that, but "The New Republic"?

And that's an important part of the dynamic in this movie. It really is like a bunch of college kids gossiping, flirting, goofing around, forming office politics factions, etc. It didn't give me a lot of confidence in the state of journalism to find out one of the "biggies" is indistinguishable from a bunch of kids putting together a school paper. I think the movie almost had to include that graphic, otherwise viewers would have thought the casting was way off, like "Where are the grown up reporters?"

But as to the story itself, it's mesmerizing at times, watching people's perceptions of Glass (Hayden Christensen) change step by step - from no doubts about him, to small doubts about him they couldn't put their finger on, to believing he got a little sloppy and made an occasional mistake or cut an occasional corner, to believing he got sucked into a practical joke by his sources and was fooled

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