My Experience With Stephen Glass Phenomenon

Stephen Glass became infamous in 1998 after being exposed for fabricating large amount of his articles culminating in the famous “Hack Heaven”, a story of a 15 year old hacker who landed a plum job in a software company after defacing their website. Stephen Glass became the subject of a movie titled - “Shattered Glass”, which I happened to see partly today on HBO. In the process I started thinking about a somewhat similar incident I faced in recent past. The part of Stephen’s story which is most interesting to me is how he duped the often skeptical and hardened editors of several famous news outlets, how did he perfectly pass the “stink test” so many times, how did he bypass the fact checking system in place at TNR?

First of all he was responsible for setting up the fact checking system in place so he knew what are the loopholes. But that is just a small part of his deception. He managed to fool the editors so many times that it makes them look like a joke. In reality I am sure they do a good job and yet they all failed, why?

One of his strategy in his own words:
“I would tell a story, and there would be fact A, which maybe was true. And then there would be fact B, which was sort of partially true and partially fabricated. And there would be fact C which was more fabricated and almost not true,” says Glass.

“And there would be fact D, which was a complete whopper. And totally not true. And so people would be with me on these stories through fact A and through fact B. And so they would believe me to C. And then at D they were still believing me through the story.”

The other was that he was a very likable and personable young man. Anyone, based on reports, would love to believe him and suspend disbelief. He was also very hardworking.

He is a remorseless liar who continues to profit, with a six figure deal, with his book “The Fabulist”, where he builds upon his web of lies and makes him look like a saint, slightly disgraced.

Another interesting part of this story is Michael Kelly, a great journalist who died while on duty in Iraq. He placed great faith on his troops and backed each of them to the hilt, even to his own peril. Michael Clark was a boss everyone dreams of. And yet he too was fully deceived by Glass.

In recent past I had an employee who closely followed Glass’s strategy and build up trust over time. He was very personable and likable. He was also very enterprising. I tested his honesty on little things and it checked out, as much as I could easily check (same fallacy that others fell into). I found little financial irregularities which when verified appeared more due to lack of knowledge than explicit intention. I started trusting him more and more, even with large sums of money and costly hardware. I had great plans on propelling him forward in his career, pushing him on to things he could never dream of with his academic qualifications. And then he went on vacation. There was a hardware fault and I tried to fix the problem. To my dismay something was seriously wrong. The hardware was nowhere near the specifications I had provided him earlier. I thought I would find them elsewhere. So for the next 15 days I was on a fact-finding mission, putting everything on hold, checking every piece of hardware I had. Costly parts were missing and sometimes exchanged with cheaper non-working parts. I couldn’t believe it. We double-checked and triple checked our findings. There was no room for any error. Finally he came back and I confronted him. He continued to deny and tried to pass blame around; none of which checked nor even passed the smoke test. Slowly more details emerged as other employees came forward with details which they didn’t suspect at that time but on later introspection looked suspicious. They didn’t want to doubt him. He comes from a good background and with good reference. And yet there was not a shred of doubt about his stealing. I had to let him go. Since then I have been racking my brain as to why I couldn’t spot this earlier, what went wrong in my process. After watching the movie and checking out more background information about Stephen Glass, I realized that I made similar errors as others.

We, myself included, often judge a man by his appearance (his body language etc.), his communication and presentation. Hard-working and enterprising individuals make a good impression which often lead us to ignore, or conveniently excuse, faults which seem so clear in 20/20 hindsight. We do check little details as part of our objective nature and so someone intelligent has to simply pass those little tests before he gains credibility. Such people also create a web of deception to cover their tracks and later makes it appear to others that he has been wronged and demonize his prosecutors as Stephen Glass has done in “The Fabulist”.

I learnt, albeit the hard way, that I need to carefully observe and analyze the facts, shelving aside emotions, feel-good factors and even gut-feelings. I need to check out fully any suspicious incidents, or delegate to someone competent and dilligent. Hard-working or enterprising doesn’t add brownie points to honesty or integrity score.

What are your thoughts?