The New Classics - Shattered Glass
Wednesday, September 4, 2019 at 12:30PM 
Scene: Fact-Finding Trip
The great real life journalism movies tend to focus on stories of monumental impact. Films like Spotlight or The Insider or All the Presidents Men are about reporters tangling with the most powerful institutions in America and uncovering scandals that affect the lives of millions.
And yet, for all their importance, I find myself thinking about those films less frequently than I think about Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass, which details a comparatively minor subject. Why is this story the one that haunts my thoughts? I was not one of Stephen Glass’s readers. Had it not been for the film I might never had heard of the wunderkind journalist who turned out to be a rampant fabulist, publishing at least twenty-seven whole or partly fabricated stories as fact during his time at The New Republic magazine...