How to Self-Servingly Play to Cultural Anxieties and Tensions
the stories we tell can frame how we are perceived
Posted Jun 5, 11:02 am in human nature, unfinished thoughts
A couple of weeks ago, I was watching an interesting biopic called “Shattered Glass” about a disgraced journalist named Stephen Glass. Glass, who is a real person, worked in the late 90s for a number of high-profile magazines, including the New Republic, George, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
Like Janet Cook before him and Jayson Blair after him, Glass was found to have substantially fabricated or outright made up stories that he submitted as factual. At least 27 stories that were published are now considered to be either partially or totally untrue. Another 14 stories are strongly suspected to be fraudulent. When fact checkers tried to substantiate his stories before they were published, the stories always checked out because Glass knew the fact checking process and how to subvert it. He was able to do this by forging notes, making fake websites, signing up for fake phone numbers for sources, and employing friends and relatives to pretend to be persons interviewed.
When Glass was exposed, it was because pieces of a story he had written about a 15 year old hacker who was bringing a big software company to its knees just wasn’t checking out; a writer from a competing magazine was not able to locate the company or hacker in question, and brought it to the attention of Chuck Lane, Glass’s editor. Glass apparently never confessed to fabrication at the time, but he was nonetheless fired from The New Republic, and his shameful story became national news. Glass lost his name, his status, and his career; he was forced into relative seclusion and will possibly live out his days in disgrace.
But as I considered this depressing tale of deceit, I realized that things didn’t have to end this way for Glass at all. In a way, Glass’s contrition and subsequent silence was really what cemented the public reaction to him. Sure, no one considered him a hero— not that they necessarily should have; after all, he was a manipulator whose actions were couched in a desire to be accepted and admired by his peers, and whose values made a mockery of journalistic integrity.
Unfortunately for Glass’s career (and possibly for the public**), he went on the record to say that the reason he did the things he did was to be loved and respected by others, not to demonstrate the media’s obsessive and reckless pursuit of sensational stories. But had he spun his story to play into the cultural anxieties about the mainstream media, the public’s perception of Stephen Glass may have been completely different.
Suppose for a minute that instead of acting shamed, Glass embraced his actions, flaunting what he did, and effectively screaming “NYAH NYAH, I TRICKED THE SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!” Say he went on all kinds of talk shows and did a barrage of magazine interviews promoting how it was all a giant prank played at the expense of some of the biggest movers and shakers in the country. I would expect that rather than being cast as some kind of deranged sociopath, Glass would instead be heralded as a sort of vigilante folk-hero who finally knocked the elitist media from their pedestals. And, I think, he’d probably get his own talk show, book deals*, and new career as a media pundit.
Currently, the pages of Digg and Reddit are filled with venom towards mainstream media outlets; in fact, so acrimonious is the attitude towards the mainstream media in these outlets that the derisive acronym MSM is used regularly without explanation, and it almost always has a very negative connotation. Stories from independent news sources and blogs about mainstream media failures (underreporting, overreporting, sensationalization, misreporting, etc.) are quite popular, and get a lot of play on these outlets. Glass would have been a hero to people whose attitudes towards mainstream media exhibited distrust, anger, and dismissiveness. This Glass guy played them all for fools.
Think about the difference in reactions of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama when each was asked about their youthful marijuana usage. Clinton, thinking about the implications on his political career, attempted to dodge: “I didn’t like it [so] I didn’t inhale.” Obama, by contrast, said, “I inhaled. Frequently. That was the point.” One of these responses caters to the mainstream opinion on the issue; drugs are bad, and anyone who does them is not a morally sound individual. On paper, you would expect this to be the one that went over well. But the other plays to the cultural tensions of people constantly having to put on masks and pretend to be people that they aren’t, and to abide by the diffuse moral standards of society. And moreover, it plays to the tiredness of people towards slippery, hypocritical politicians.
In both of these cases, which of the stories is more culturally salient, and better addresses the unvoiced frustrations of everyday people?
Just a thought.
*Glass actually did get a book deal at the time; he received a reported six-figure advance for his “novel” The Fabulist, which is essentially an autobiography (the main character’s name is Stephen Glass and he is a journalist who makes stuff up and gets caught doing it). The book suffered from poor reviews.
**Despite the fact that his actions were not part of a grand plot to demonstrate the fallibility of the print media, saying it was might have had some kind of positive impact on how the media perceived itself and how it might have taken action to avoid future incidents of a similar nature.