It only took a quarter-century for journalism to run through its latest ethical cycle, progressing from the idealism of Woodward and Bernstein to the cynicism of Jayson Blair in a single generation. All the President’s Men (and Network) won Oscars in 1976, inspiring college students to become hard-digging reporters and high-minded editors. But their sons and daughters will form their opinions about news and truth from Shattered Glass, the surprisingly entertaining and even-handed biopic based on the short, sad career of Stephen Glass.



Glass was a staffer for The New Republic who, in the mid-’90s, enjoyed 15 minutes of fame as a precocious talent emerging from the pack of wannabe celebrity journalists. Still in his mid-20s, he was the envy of his colleagues and the darling of the smart set, his byline appearing in Harper’s, George and other hipster magazines. He was witty and gossipy, and he displayed an uncanny ability to dig up original stories full of scintillating details and quotations.



Unfortunately, he possessed one character flaw, a fatal one for a writer: Glass was a chronic liar. At least 27 of the 41 pieces he published in TNR turned out to be fabrications, a ruse discovered not by his acquiescent editors but by a rival reporter from Forbes Digital Tool, upbraided for having been scooped. When Adam Penenberg tried to trace Glass’ sources in an article about a teenage computer hacker, he found the story to be entirely fabulous, a product of its author’s imagination.



Glass was fired, but the damage to his publication, not to mention the embarrassment to his profession, remains his legacy. To single out Glass as a special case would be unfair, however. The Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, New York Times and other prominent papers have all been victimized by mendacious opportunists looking to climb to the top the easy way. Why the rash of cheating and fraud? Newsrooms, once the haunt of beat reporters who cut their teeth covering crime scenes and council meetings, increasingly are populated by Ivy-educated correspondents in Brooks Brothers suits hoping to secure a place at the cable banquet. “The more prominent today’s star journalists become, the more they are forced to give up the essence of real journalism,” writes James Fallows in Breaking the News, a devastating critique of his industry published in 1996. “The best-known and best-paid people in journalism now set an example that erodes the quality of the news we receive and threatens journalism’s claim on public respect.”



Filmmaker Billy Ray shares Fallows’ alarm—he has described the TNR incident as “a wake-up call about the state of journalism in this country”—but to his credit he does not pontificate. Shattered Glass, despite its cloying title, is an engaging and fair-minded depiction of a talented writer destroyed by his own ambition. It is also an inspiring if hagiographic portrait of the young editor, Chuck Lane, who was forced to confront a journalist’s worst nightmare.



Wisely, Ray tells the story straight—except for a framing device which has Glass speaking to students at his former high school—and he gets the details right. Office politics at a magazine like TNR aren’t unique—petty jealousies and sycophantic maneuvering are universal—but Ray captures the rhythms of this particular workplace brilliantly. More importantly, he gets perfect-pitch performances from a well-placed cast. Hayden Christensen (as Glass) is charming, unctuous, calculating and vulnerable—a con artist who has sold himself on the truth of his scams. Peter Sarsgaard (as Lane) looks and acts the part of the smart, aspiring careerist in over his head, self-effacing but Machiavellian nevertheless. Hank Azaria (as Michael Kelly, the renowned editor killed covering the war in Iraq) is a bit avuncular, and Chloë Sevigny (as Caitlin Avery, colleague and confidante of Glass) is a tad naïve, but overall the movie feels right.



No small aspect of this rightness is the fact that TNR’s travesty-in-waiting was discovered by an Internet journalist, not the magazine’s own fact checkers. By coincidence or on purpose, Steve Zahn (as Forbes’ Penenberg) evokes the old-fashioned kind of reporter who liked nothing better than getting the goods on the arrogant and pompous. Those journalists, writes Fellows, thought of themselves as Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca—“hard-boiled, tough-seeming, but surprisingly brave and idealistic when bullies threw their weight around.” Could it be that everything old is new again? We might have to look for the answer to that question online rather than in print.