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It Can't Happen at The New Yorker

Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, Dec. 7, 2000, at 4:12 PM ET

After the New Republic's Stephen Glass was unmasked as a journalistic fabricator in the spring of 1998, journalists everywhere proclaimed that the fiction-masquerading-as-fact Glass slipped by his New Republic editors would never have made it into their rigorous publications.

Among those counting major coup was Peter Canby, the viscount of fact-checking at The New Yorker. "We would have smoked it out very quickly," Canby told the New York Times of the Glass fraud. Perhaps intuiting that he might be tempting the fates, Canby quickly tacked in another direction: "However, I can tell you that there is no absolute guard."

Oh, Canby! If only you had shut your mouth there! If only you had known that two years later, it would be your squadron of sharp-penciled fact-checkers taking snarling rounds of ack-ack from the journalistic community for the Glassian fabrications Rodney Rothman included in his Nov. 27 New Yorker feature "My Fake Job."

Alas, New Yorker hubris overwhelmed Canby, and he returned to praising his own publication at the expense of the New Republic:

The good checkers have an instinct and they just know if it's solid or not. Beyond that, it's the process of cross-checking. We really don't take anything at face value. We check things in the notes and even if we have the notes, we still go to the sources.



In lieu of eating humble pie, Canby might want to send his apologies to:

Martin Peretz, Editor in Chief
The New Republic
1220 19th St. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036



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Reader Comments from The Fray:


The New Yorker story had at least a tiny factual kernel--the writer really did hang around the dot-com office and pretend to work there. He just left out all the fun-deflating facts such as that his mother worked there and vouched for him, and of course tossed in total whoppers such as the massage.

Glass invented stories out of thin air--what's more, his stories usually had a heavy partisan edge to them (often sneering at Republicans) and weren't even plausible on the surface. In that case, TNR suffered a huge loss of credibility because it became obvious that they were willing to publish almost anything that supported their ideological prejudices, no matter how far-fetched. (Indeed, Matt Drudge is a more thorough fact-checker than the Glass-era editors of TNR--or today, for all we know.)

Still, The New Yorker has no room to make any of these points. They published what was essentially an urban legend simply because it flattered their own preconceptions about dot-com firms and because the story no doubt sent shivers down their yuppie-despising spines. The moment I heard about the story one word came to mind: [click here to find out what it is].

--Brian

(To reply, click here.)


Having read, with initial interest, "My Fake Job" in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago, my reaction was one of disappointment. The piece, notwithstanding the fact that parts have now been revealed as fiction, was not worthy of the attention it received then, nor worthy of publication in the magazine itself. The article was poorly written, wasn't insightful in any way, and was poor journalism. The concept was very clever, and it could have been funny and interesting presented either as fiction or fact had it been pulled off well. But as far as I'm concerned, it failed completely in its mission to be anything more than filler.

The fact that the writer has been "creative" in any way with the facts of the article strikes me as being quite funny in fact, as I thought he could have used more creativity with respect to what one could possibly do in such a great situation without having to lie about it. The fact that the aspects of the article that were "fiction" were so dull, only further shows how poor the article was in its entirety.

It wasn't due any major attention to begin with, I'm sorry to see that it's getting more now. The New Yorker shouldn't be faulted so much for its lack of fact-checking, but for its lack of sense in publishing such a pointless piece to begin with.

--L.Marie

(To reply, click here.)

(12/11)

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