Editing Stephen Glass
I was searching for something or other, and I happened across an article on a different subject that caught my eye—this 1996 article by Jonathan Chait (he of BDS pride) about his fallen buddy Stephen Glass, the serial liar whose career at TNR ended in ignominy.
Chait is very angry at Glass, and rightly so. Chait’s trying to excuse/explain how he, and so many of our Best and Brightest, could have been so fooled by a sociopathic con man.
An interesting subject, to say the least.
I know a certain amount about Stephen Glass and his deceptive career. I saw the movie “Shattered Glass,” and I’ve read the Vanity Fair article on which it was based. But I couldn’t remember encountering the following facts that Chait relates [emphasis mine]:
After [Glass] was caught, I often heard it said that he should write novels. Perhaps he heard this himself and took it to heart. But it was clear all along that this notion was terribly misguided. He never had much talent for prose. When his stories read well, it usually resulted from heavy rewriting, most notably by Kelly. (Very often he would hand his stories to me minutes before they were due, and, to save him from embarrassment, I would perform a kind of emergency triage on his text, rearranging it into something resembling a coherent structure.) Moreover, his stories were interesting only because they were purportedly true. The characters in his stories, as in his novel, lack any depth or believability.
So, in addition to being a long-undetected serial liar as a journalist, Stephen Glass was a writer who could not write. And yet he was considered a wunderkind at TNR for three full years, hired at the ripe old age of 23, and also wrote for Policy Review, George, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s, and had publishers interested in a book. Say what you will about the viewpoints and thought processes presented in those publications (and I’m not familiar with all of them), most of the articles in them seem to be decently—and even well—written, at least in the technical sense of use of language and the flow of prose.
It seems that Glass’s articles were so poorly executed that they needed an almost complete rewrite, leaving just the bare bones of the idea. It’s not that such a thing is never done in the publishing world, but it’s my impression that it’s usually done for someone more illustrious, someone with a reputation and at least a modicum of fame, someone whom the periodical wishes to pamper and court. But a 23-year old kid, at what is probably one of his first real jobs as an adult? Preposterous.
So, why? Why such a heavy assist? Reading the rest of Chait’s piece, and remembering some of what I already knew about Glass, I’d say it appears that everyone’s almost overwhelming desire to coddle Glass (sort of like a kitten) and keep him around had to do with his uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with people, to entertain them, and to seem personally vulnerable at the same time. A kind of fun mascot, he was the kid brother you want to protect.
I’m not sure what this has to do with politics; perhaps nothing. But it doesn’t escape my attention that most of those enabling Glass were liberals (although the late Michael Kelly, an editor who was a moderate, was a prominent one of Glass’s champions). Make of that what you will.
Here’s Charles Lane, the editor who finally caught Glass, on how it felt to be taken in:
We extended normal human trust to someone who basically lacked a conscience…We thought Glass was interested in our personal lives, or our struggles with work, and we thought it was because he cared. Actually, it was all about sizing us up and searching for vulnerabilities. What we saw as concern was actually contempt
I like to think my radar’s good enough that I wouldn’t be taken in by a con artist. And maybe I wouldn’t—and fortunately, so far I haven’t, at least to the best of my knowledge. But I realize that everyone is somewhat vulnerable, including me, to a really good con. That’s the hallmark of the best ones; they charm and disarm their victims.
I suppose I’m writing this because I continue to think of Obama as a con artist, one much of America has fallen for—and may fall for again, unfortunately. Once the mark has been conned, it’s very difficult to break the spell. The truth has to hit that person in the face with unequivocal certainty.
I still don’t get it. Maybe you really did have to be there.
Liz: that’s the thing about cons. In retrospect, it always seems as though “I wouldn’t have been taken in; I would have seen the truth. How could the others have been so dumb?”
And in this case it really does some like the red flags were enormous.
But we should beware of the hubris of thinking we wouldn’t have fallen for it. Cons are very good at what they do. Apparently Glass was so good at seeming like a helpless, kindly, and entertaining child in need of assistance, and also so entertaining, that everyone dropped his/her guard.
That’s assuming they had a guard in the first place.
Neoneocon, you wrote: “I like to think my radar’s good enough that I wouldn’t be taken in by a con artist. And maybe I wouldn’t–and fortunately, so far I haven’t, at least to the best of my knowledge.”
When Alfred Hitchcock was asked by Johnny Carson if the perfect murder would ever be committed, “Hitch” responded, to Johnny’s surprise, that it happens all the time. He explained that the perfect murder is not a crime that can not be solved, but a murder which is never identified as a crime in the first place. Your afterthought (“. . . at least to the best of my knowledge”) says it all.
As you said none of us are immune, but sometimes it’s more a matter of the accompanying circumstances than one’s native intelligence or awareness. Take for example an unscrupulous contractor going to the hurricane-ravaged coast and overcharging for sub-standard service. After the disaster, the contractor’s gone with the money and untraceable, but no one thought to check beforehand because no person of good conscience would ever take advantage of a disaster victim. And of course that’s true; no one of good conscience would take advantage of a victim that way.
Chait’s trying to excuse/explain how he, and so many of our Best and Brightest, could have been so fooled by a sociopathic con man.
Easy. They’re not our Best and Brightest. They just think they are. Dunning and Kruger published on this phenomenon.
Occam’s Beard,
Your point gives credence to an old (and true) aphorism. Perhaps you really can’t fool the best and the brightest just like you can’t cheat an honest man.
But I realize that everyone is somewhat vulnerable, including me, to a really good con. That’s the hallmark of the best ones; they charm and disarm their victims.
In fairness, T, I think anyone can be fooled. Just as every hitter has a flaw in his swing, we each have some weakness for being conned, if only the con man can discern it.
I once had a department chairman who was the very best con artist I’ve (fortunately) ever encountered. He could talk the birds down out of the trees. Several times I caught myself starting to believe his BS, when I’d been present at the incident he was addressing and knew perfectly well what had happened (which was related to his version of events by an inversion operator). But several times he had me going for a minute. He was that good.
Best and brightest don’t choose journalism or social sciences as their profession, to begin with. They go to physics, engineering or mathematics, or, may be, computer science. Other choices indicate that they find math too hard or too boring (that is the same: really bright people never find math boring!).
So….. We are the ones to hit them over the head with Obama’s lies, alarums, and diversions.
Sergei wrote:
...really bright people never find math boring.
That’s a great relief to me. I’ve long had serious doubts about my intelligence!
Jamie Irons
Your federal government workplace has a significant number of these types of people. They con their way through 30 year careers. It’s really almost impressive if it were not so sad.
I think that charm plays a role in a lot of cons, plus the necessity in this day and age of taking people to a certain extent at face-value. We seldom live and work in the same places we grew up, so beyond carefully vetted documents – diplomas, certificates – whose to say who we are?
I have met a couple of con artists personally and professionally. I don’t think that being contemptuous was how they felt when they dealt with people any more than you feel contempt toward an opponent in a game. It’s only if they were called out or caught that they’d feel the need to rub in how they’d “won.” At least one of them was making up for personal inadequacies and rose on the basis of the Peter Principal.
One did all sorts of things: embezzlement, kited checks, living in other people’s houses, etc. To me, it seems ridiculous that he got away with it because he was known as a bad BS artist as a youth. But most of his marks (including the family with the ocean-side summerhouse where he lived rent-free) didn’t know him. He barely made it through high school, but he read profusely and learned early on that if you got a person to talk about themselves, you’d pick up facts that you could use later to fit into their crowd. He ended up in prison only because he stayed in one place long enough for the law to catch up, and he disappeared after Hurricane Katrina.
Honestly, some of his “con” is what I use in my life. My father had a joke about a man who substituted “Fantastic!” for “Who gives a shit?”, and I discovered on my own that some classmates/co-workers would ridicule me if they learned about my upbringing, etc. So I combined the two by letting other people dominate the conversation, with only a few interjected compliments or curious questions – especially questions in which a person can show off his expertise – and it works wonders. I’M a great conversationalist when I let them talk and I’m so INTERESTING when I ask about their own interests. Of course, no one really knows me until after I am comfortable in the job or feel I can reveal myself without repercussions.
Sergey,
I am not sure I agree. There is, of course, a certain kind of intelligence that deals with very abstract concepts, but some of the people I’ve known like that weren’t particularly good at dealing with the messiness of life. They love their controlled experiments.
One of the things that turned me from the feminists was their denigration of the wisdom and abilities of my mother, aunts and great aunts, none of whom broke any glass ceilings. They knew how to deal with grieving, how to read the expression on a young boy’s face and handle his problem, how to stretch a dollar and make a welcoming home. Their kind of wisdom probably offered a lot of protection from con artists.
Some of the STEM types I know are so fascinated by their field that they actually pay little attention to anything else and just follow the lead of the VY League social scientist types.
Sergei, I would have to disagree. I know a few older journalists (in newspapers, not TV) who are not only bright, but they channel their intelligence into hunting down information. One explained to me several years ago how he figured out from reading paperwork that a municipality paid for nonexistent police cars and furniture, that complaints by two readers that their checkbooks didn’t balance led him to a bank embezzlement, etc.
On the flip side, my family has mathematicians, engineers, and one bona fide rocket scientist. Sometimes they are DUMB. Almost burned down the house by speed-drying his work shirt over a gas burner? Mensa says he’s a genius, but we’re not so sure sometimes!
really bright people never find math boring
A little too pat, methinks. One could say the same thing about literature, history, or philosophy with equal validity. Yet math speaks to some people, while language speaks to others. I’ve previously related the saga of my math genius friend whose flights of linguistic style (in prose and speech) ran to “subject verb object.” Conversely, Goethe (est. IQ ca. 200, IIRC) had no record of mathematical achievement or interest and (again, IIRC) reportedly struggled with algebra.
expat, what you say of your family’s women is so true. My mother was the only woman in her family to have a college degree (in mathematics to boot), but there was never any question in her mind that her sister, mother and aunts were all smart women. I was appalled that so-called “feminists” tried to drive a wedge between them and denigrated women who stayed home for several years with young children before returning to work.
Also – and this is a point I sometimes make – the early feminists, the Suffragists, won the right to vote AND THEN WENT HOME. This fact is lamented today (such as in the Henry Ford Museum’s exhibit), but it makes a lot of sense. These were the same women who believed abortion was a great evil because it created an enmity between mother and child. Susan B. Anthony would weep to see how women have access to education, representation, and property rights but “women’s rights” have been reduced to abortion and subsidized birth control.
One point that the movie made: the fact that Glass’s co-workers helped edit and rewrite his pieces meant that they then had a personal investment in the pieces. They were therefore less likely to think critically about the truth of the content.
My brother in law and mother in law are both Obama voting libs who have been conned a few times. They are easy marks.
I’m good at avoiding cons because I’m a skeptical thinker who tends to see through them, but that doesn’t mean I’m ammune.
Neoneocon said :” I like to think my radar’s good enough that I wouldn’t be taken in by a con artist”
I thought you were a recovering liberal? Ok, maybe not fair, but I couldn’t resist a hanging curve ball.
Why are some people able to pick up cues so much better than others? That’s a serious question for you I’m usually very good at spotting a phoney, I know many who just never see it.
Maybe it takes one to know one, but I’m hoping you won’t offer that as payback.
“women’s rights” have been reduced to abortion and subsidized birth control
I’ve marveled at this too. It’s as if the feminists subscribe to Freud’s famous aphorism “biology is destiny,” although if put to them in so many words they’d be apoplectic.
Why are some people able to pick up cues so much better than others?
One critical factor may be a willingness to face unpleasant facts. The gullible seem prone to saying/thinking “They’d would never do that.” Yeah, they would. You have to consider that possibility.
As mentioned previously, one useful habit to facilitate identifying attempts to mislead is to prepend to each statement the other person makes, “He wants me to believe that …” Regardless of whether or not the speaker is trying to mislead me, that indirect discourse construction helps me to maintain emotional distance in contexts that call for a dispassionate assessment. The trick is figuring out which contexts those are!
Oops. Sorry about the italics
I like to think my radar’s good enough that I wouldn’t be taken in by a con artist
Dangerous sentiment, I suspect, and one that a good con artist could probably use to advantage. Admission that one could be conned facilitates vigilance, just as an army’s recognition that it could be defeated promotes harder training and greater effort. Complacency can exact its toll.
I think the con reached out to Obama and met him more than halfway. He didn’t even have try. I get the sense that he himself has been amazed by the effect he has on people. Didn’t he say something about being a screen on which people project their fantasies?
I get the sense that he sits back and watches it all with a pothead’s amused detachment. Unless — that is — he’s threatened with losing it, and that brings out a more active kind of ugliness in his personality.
Has anyone else seen the rapture in the Obamanauts’ eyes when they see Their Beloved? Creepy. People, we’re choosing an executive. He’s not going to feed the masses with loaves and fishes.
Occam,
I have seen honest men cheated, because they never suspected anyone of doing something that they themselves would never consider doing. Sure, greedy people are easy enough to suck in with an idea that seems too good to be true. Still, this country is full of kindly old people who help out a young, naive con man or woman. I see that pattern all the time with Obama’s gulls.
My private-duty patient’s mother and I were chuckling a bit this afternoon, that “Innocent” in both Spanish and English, can have the connotation of stupid.
Occam’s Beard: that’s why I said I like to think it, and then followed by saying I know I’m vulnerable nevertheless, as is everyone.
Has anyone else seen the rapture in the Obamanauts’ eyes when they see Their Beloved?
I saw exactly this expression in the early ’80s when I was a soldier stationed in Germany talking with an elderly German lady. We were chatting (in German) about the politics of the day, when the discussion turned to the past and the 12-year memory gap that many older Germans seem to have. Her eyes went all dreamy for a moment and she said, almost to herself, “I saw him once…” before breaking her own spell and becoming a sensible Frau again. We both knew who him was, and it sure looked to me like the con still had some legs, at least with that generation. I bet it’s the same thought process at work with many of 0bama’s minions.
OT: CBS News broke this story today.
There was, according to the Libyan witnesses, NO “protest” at all at the Benghazi consulate: but a well-orchestrated military attack:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7422322n&tag=mncol;lst;2
Kudos to CBS reporter Elizabeth Palmer for doing some Real reporting.
Anyone who is “taken in” by the Indonesian Dog-Eater is too dumb for words. He is a laughable con-man. His stupidity shows through from the first two minutes one listend to him and it just gets worse from there. You’d have to be brain-dead to take anything he says seriously. The moment he mentioned the absolutely hysterical mathematical idiocy of “profit AD earnings ratios” anyone with even half a brain understood that the Malevolent Retard had the mathematical sophistication of a slow 8th grader. Obviously he didn’t crack 420 on the math section of his SATs. He’s an idiot. A fool. An imbecile of incredible proportions. Just to put it in perspective, his “profit and earnings ratio” idiocy is tantamount to someone describing driving along the highway at “65 minutes and hours”. This guy couldn’t even pass a high school equivalency.
No. Barky is no con-man. He’s just an idiot who was pushed along by affirmative action and the worst suicidal impulses of white guilt.
I could go into excruciating detail about hundreds of his other bits of idiocy but it’s all the same. He is too dumb for words, really. America was not conned by the Indonesian Imbecile. America voted for Suicide by Indonesian in 2008 and the MFM and leftist dem party went all-in and were wedded to the retard’s every position since. Luckily for them, most do want to see America dstroyed, so they are pretty happy with how things are going. But not even Barky’s strongest supporters think that he’s got a brain in his head or does anything but constantly lie. He abuses them as much as anyone else and they love him for it. Reporters love to slobber over him all the more because he locks them in closets.
Barky is not a con-man. He’s a very dangerous idiot bent on the destruction of America (luckily for him destruction doesn’t take any talent or skill, just power) who is merely the symptom of a very sick society that has lost all sense of reason.
Waltj,
A friend of my sister’s, a blond man who was fluent in German, was vacationing in Bavaria’s mountains about 30 years ago, and stopped in an inn for supper. He ordered his meal in German, as he enjoyed passing for a native. Only one or two other tables had tourists: the rest had local people, mostly men stopping by for a tankard. Eventually the tourists left.
Then one man started to sing. The others looked around, and began to join in: soon all were singing, strong and deep. David’s hair stood up on the back of his neck: it was the Horst Wessel Song.
He said he’ll never forget the air in the room: they were still True Believers, to a man.
Beverly:
Back in the day, my German allowed me to pass for a native, too, except, of course, when I was in my US Army Oberleutnant’s uniform. I picked up lots of interesting tidbits about my German hosts by just hanging out in civvies, things that they never would have shared with a foreigner. But I also got a lot of mileage out of being the curious Amerikaner who wanted to know more about the “real” Germany and Germans. I was never privy to a full-throated rendition of the Horst Wessel Lied, but the older gent who owned a military miniatures store, and had a whole diorama of a Nuremberg Party Rally in his back room was a similarly hair-raising experience. And this was not in Bavaria, but in the Frankfurt a. M. area, a region not known for reactionary politics.
They just think they are. Dunning and Kruger published on this phenomenon.
Laurence J. Peter wrote on it, too. These “Best and Brightest” reached their level of competence as sophomoric essay writers, but went on to careers in writing, thereby exceeding their abilities.
I like to think my radar’s good enough that I wouldn’t be taken in by a con artist.
You probably won’t until your mental acuity fades. I have seen too many elderly become overly generous and gullible in proportion to their age.
I moved to a new neighborhood. For a while salesmen and saleswomen visited my front door or called on the phone to offer me security systems, provided, of course, that I provide many details about my current security measures. My advice: never take such phone calls; take pictures of all door-to-door security salesmen.
I’ve said this before: I’ve never met a journalist who was actually well-informed. They make a great show of “knowing the real deal” and “having the inside story” but it always turns out to simply be what someone else told them. They are often quite gullible, despite their cynical pose.
I’ve also met very few journalists who could actually write well. (I worked as a copy editor on two papers.) And a great deal of what they publish is simply reprinted press releases anyway. Simple test: if it’s well-written, it’s probably a press release.
Finally, I don’t think journalists are especially good at finding out things. They do get paid to attend public meetings and ask questions, but I don’t think they are any better at that than any random citizen chosen off the street. The chief advantage they have is that most people love to talk about themselves, and given half a chance will spill everything. (Police interrogators rely on this, too.)
In the old days, being a reporter was the job you got if you were a bright working-class fellow who didn’t want to be a bookkeeper or a priest. Now it’s the job that ambitious upper-class fellows get if they can’t become a professor or a lawyer. It’s attracting a better class of failures.
Re: Glass getting his colleagues to rewrite his stories – Isn’t it common for cons to get the mark to do them a favor, because the mark has then invested in his well being & it is harder to walk away?
Ben Franklin knew this: “He that has done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
Trimegestus
A fair number of peers from my high school, perhaps influenced by the Watergate affair, became journalists. Over the years, their bylines have appeared in such publications as the NYT and the WaPo, among other publications. These journalists from my high school were pretty bright people- among them were Merit Finalists. While some became your run of the mill lib or ranting radical journalist, several strayed off the lefty plantation.
I grew up on a farm and graduated from Columbia (a long time ago – OK 1964) and I’ve always been aware that there are many kinds of intelligence. I’m really dumb kinesthetically except for some reason I can dance. I’ve been conned big time and can attest that if someone gets you in a blind spot their work is much easier. I would also admit that I’ve helped by not being an honest man. But no one fooled me as much as my own son. He never learned to read or write properly and I never fully realized it until I tried to teach him how to use a computer when he was about 30. He eluded school and kept his teachers fooled too, went to work at 15 and succeeded in a body shop. I realized he had very different talents when I asked him if I had a dented fender properly repaired. He had to make me run my hand over the problem area three times before I could feel it. School promotes certain kinds of intelligence, represses others. I’m predisposed to see and understand academic intelligence. But life has taught me not to take that kind of intelligence, or myself, too seriously.