16 Comments

The decline of the media is not because of the people like Glass who committed overt fraud.

The decline stems from news organizations which, day after day, put their thumb on the news, twisting, spinning and distorting. And yes, fabricating.

The new norm isn't what Glass did. It is far more insidious. And since it is widespread and leadership approved, it is far worse.

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The reason Stephen Glass gets no second chance is because the media needs this story. This was from an era when the media owned up to its mistakes. Now in the era of political correctness, the media pretends the errors and frauds never happened. So the media likes to relive this story over and over, to assure itself of what it wants to believe—that it will not tolerate lies and maintains high standards. Also, Stephen Glass is a white guy. The other notorious media fraud story of the era, Janet Cooke at the Washington Post, centers around a black woman. Are there any plays about Janet Cooke?

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Wow, great piece. I agree that people don’t deserve lifelong torment for mistakes or bad decisions. He probably shouldn’t have been admitted to the bar, but the constant mining of his life for content does seem harsh and tired at this point. Many journalists have done far worse and haven’t received this treatment.

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He was just ahead of his time as half the stories printed by MSM are partly fiction.

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Like much of what Legacy news media likes to push nowadays, the attack on Caucasian Male Stephen Glass is, "Safe and Effective" at pushing the narrative that legacy media is responsible.

Does no one understand that Yellow Journalism ignited the Spanish-American War in 1898?

Media has been doing this for a long time.

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How relevant is his Jewishness? Extremely--the pile on for any misdeed is all the greater if you are Jewish. And all the more vicious if Jews defend themselves.

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"We like to think of ourselves as a nation that believes in redemption."

We may like to think it is so, but reality increasingly belies the claim. Redemption is a Judeo-Christian concept, rooted in individualism. The "ethics" of power involves rapid rehabilitation for friends and eternal damnation for enemies.

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This segment points to today’s hubris, or tragic blindness: over-confidence in technology or failure to consider the risk of “garbage in, garbage out” which is “infecting” every domain - from healthcare to government policy to economics. “Though none of them were epidemiologists, Mecher, Hatchett, and Glass were convinced that computer modeling would transform epidemiology. In The Premonition, Glass reflected on old-school scientists like Henderson with a kind of pity. “I asked myself, ‘Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?’ ” he told Lewis. “They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have the tools.” Tools like computer models.

Henderson, on the other hand, believed that basing pandemic mitigation strategies on hypothetical models—models that themselves were based on hypothetical assumptions—could lead policymakers deeply astray. He said that people behaved in unpredictable ways that models could not capture. “

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If I were the author of this piece I would have mentioned Jayson Blair, formerly of the NY Times. There aren't many who bring his name up even though he did very similar things.

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"We like to think of ourselves as a nation that believes in redemption."

Really?

Since when?

And since you put it into your article: Ted Kennedy left someone to fucking DIE and didn't report it to the police...

There's obtuse and then there's "New York obtuse..."

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Actually, Joe, this column could be the basis for the next--and final--Stephen Glass production: "The Second Chance."

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Nocera provides many examples of leftists committing questionable and typical leftist acts up to murder by an American prince. Forgiveness? Certainly in certain cases.

Perhaps Glass doesn't require your nor our forgiveness. My take on your uncorroborated report of Glass' 180° reversal might actually be somewhat true. Even if 100% true once bitten, twice shy.

Nocera is a mushy leftist almost as bad as Wiseman.

Forgive me for that. Oh. Wait. I don't care.

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Glass is your typical leftist.

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