The most spectacular such take is The New Republic’s Stephen Glass [1], which case blew up in 1998. As a 25-Year-Old rising star in the annals of journalism, he went from fabricating the occasional quote for far-flung articles to making up entire pieces using fictitious people, organizations, and events. He wrote stories to suit his ambition to be recognized as an emerging talent with an ability to uncover the wild, the eccentric, the incredible.

“Everything around him turned out to be incredibly vivid or zany or in some other way memorable,” said Leon Wieseltier, a co-worker at The New Republic, “and at the meetings, we used to wait for Steve’s turn, so that he could report on his next caper. We got really suckered.”

If it’s too good to be true, kids, it probably is. Steve Glass made cosmetic attempts to fool the magazine’s fact checkers and to his amazement they continually worked. As he got away with it more and more frequently, he began to push the envelope. As I saw on 60 Minutes [2] last weekend, he fabricated stories about Monica Lewinsky Condoms and an evangelical church that worshipped George W. Bush. Nobody caught on — perhaps because they didn’t want to?

Stephen Glass is apologetic and pathologically repentant for his actions, claims to have been in therapy, and.. oh — by the way? He’s just published a fictional novel based on his life story (he apparently still can’t grasp his own irony) called “The Fabulist” [5]. His undoing was a wholly fictitious piece about a 15-year-old hacker who worked his way into the systems of a fake company called “Jukt Micronics” and extorted the company for tens of thousands of dollars not to do it again. When Forbes Magazine [3] attempted to follow up on the piece, well, they couldn’t verify a single fact.

The penny dropped.

More recently we hear the tale of 27-year-old New York Times reporter Jayson Blair [4], recently outed and accused of the same thing, though he made very few attempts to conceal his fabrications to fact-checkers. When the story broke this past May that Blair had plagiarized huge tranches of a story from the San Antonio Express-News for a New York Times piece on Iraq war MIAs, the New York Times began a forensic bumfuzzling that revealed a long history of fabricated quotes, people, and events– along with other blatant examples of plagiarism — among Blair’s 700 articles, and published a 7200 word article accounting for these. The accounting took only a week to examine the previous 7 months (73 articles) for Blair’s inventiveness.

The question is… if you can check 73 articles in a week, why aren’t you checking the facts all along? I suspect that the answer is more nefarious than Publishers or Editors would like to admit. The reality is that, in competing more and more for their audience, newspapers and magazine have made bold attempts to become edgier, innovative, conniving. Woodward & Bernstein agonized for weeks as they waited for fact-checkers, researchers, editors, and lawyers to release their Watergate story once completed. The reality is that, nowadays, editors risk missing out on a story by waiting too long — there’s too much competition from realtime media like CNN, CNBC, and Internet publications to risk missing out on a big piece.

And as the drive to be different from the pack gets ever more compelling, what constitutes a “big piece” becomes a broader and broader topic for editors. The lesson, as always, is that we just can’t hold these institutions in such high esteem as we do. They’re fallible, because they’re human, and as money and power and competition and politics further intervene in the journalistic process they tend to become more fallible, more easily manipulated, and more inaccurate.

…and, apparently, they become platforms for young fiction authors seeking to make a name for themselves. Even in the college of writers, apparently, it doesn’t matter how you get famous. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie based on Jayson Blair..

-Ian.

[1] http://www.tnr.com/archive/0698/062998/ourreaders062998.html [2] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/07/60minutes/main552819.shtml [3] http://www.forbes.com/1998/05/11/otw3.html [4] http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/ 691dnacb.asp [5] http://www.pressdemocrat.com/opinion/columns/21note.html

Broadband’s still only @ 21%. Blah. We suck.

-Ian.

———– http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/06/0306broadband.html

Media A First: Broadband Beats Dial-Up Penelope Patsuris, 03.06.02, 1:04 PM ET

NEW YORK – For the first time ever, broadband Web surfers spent more time online than their dial-up counterparts, says Nielsen/NetRatings. That news should be a wake-up call to the many companies that have missed the opportunity so far to jumpstart broadband usage, which is still in only 21% of homes that are online, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

The report showed that broadband users spent 1.19 billion hours online in the month of January, up 64% year over year, and that represents 51% of the total 2.3 billion hours consumers spent online. The study accounted for the “always-on” broadband connections by monitoring only active usage: If a PC went idle for 30 minutes, it was considered offline and those last 30 minutes were counted as just one minute.

Despite growing broadband use, the industry has yet to truly capitalize on the trend.

Microsoft (nyse: MSFT – news – people) for instance has just 100,000 broadband users on its MSN Internet service, according to Jupiter Research. Microsoft is partnered with the satellite company StarBand to offer high-speed access, and with the Baby Bells like SBC Communications (nyse: SBC – news – people) and Verizon Communications (nyse: VZ – news – people) to offer MSN-branded DSL. “They do have a deal with Qwest to migrate all of their DSL subscribers to MSN,” says Jupiter analyst Dylan Brooks, “and that should bring them up to 400,000 broadband subscribers.” Relative to the roughly 10 million broadband connections in the U.S., that’s not much.

Cable modems outnumber DSL connections two-to-one in the U.S., according to Jeffries & Co. analyst Frederick Moran, and that’s the key market Microsoft has been unable to crack.

AOL Time Warner (nyse: AOL – news – people) will of course have an easier time getting out AOL-branded cable modems since it owns Time Warner cable. So far the conglomerate currently has 1.9 million subscribers on its Road Runner service, according to CIBC analyst Michael Gallant. “They only just started rolling out AOL-branded cable modems in the fourth quarter,” he says, “so it’s too early to tell how that’s going.” Gallant says AOL also has agreements to sell DSL through some Baby Bells, but by the end of the year it will have just 300,000 subscribers.

Both AOL and Microsoft’s broadband products have been hindered by the extreme reluctance of cable companies to permit Internet service providers to offer services using their lines. “This news just reinforces the point that the cable guys have got to come up with some agreements,” says Bernstein analyst Tom Wolzien. “It’s in the cable companies’ best interest to offer multiple ISPs, just as it is for them to offer multiple premium cable channels like HBO.” They bring in more money.

AOL Time Warner was forced to open its lines to EarthLink (nasdaq: ELNK – news – people) as a condition of its merger, and in 1995 Microsoft invested $1 billion in Comcast (nasdaq: CMCS – news – people), which gives them a kind of “most favored nation” status with the cable operator. But beyond that there haven’t been any really big deals, says Wolzien.

When cable finally does open itself to ISPs, it will then be up to the likes of AOL and Microsoft–or their suppliers–to generate the kind of content that will spur broadband usage.

Wolzien argues that broadband’s evolution is mirroring that of cable television, which didn’t get past the plateau of 20% household penetration until the industry began offering better content that gave consumers a reason to spend the money on cable. “Things didn’t pick up until HBO, ESPN and Turner came along, and it will be the same with broadband,” he says. “People don’t buy technology for technology’s sake, and they don’t need broadband for e-mail. It’s ultimately going to be up to Microsoft and AOL to show people why they need broadband.”