Stephen Glass has been groomed perhaps even before high school in the art of creating illusions to entertain others. In Highland High, he participated in Adventures of the Mind, which drew like minded imaginative students who loved the thrill of writing and thinking up scenarios. Quick wit became second nature to Glass. According to Vanity Fair, "...they were asked to prepare a musical in 15 minutes. Or come up, rapid-fire, with clever commercial slogans. Or act out raising a chair off the ground to see if it would float. It was the perfect fodder for smart kids." He got away with lying because of his calculating personality, disillusioned coworkers and white privilege. To illustrate the spell Glass's personality cast over his coworkers …show more content…
. . it's performed by overworked, underpaid 24 year-olds (the director said that, at early screenings, nobody believed that the magazine's staff was that young, so they had to put those [factually accurate] cards at the beginning) who only had 3 days to check a LOT of material." 4 of 7 days were devoted to production. So it wasn't that hard for someone like Stephen Glass to subvert the process. The editors let their own fascination with the material, along with Glass's charisma, cloud and impede their judgement for good journalism. Charles lane makes this point clear, "We extended normal human trust to someone who basically lacked a conscience... We busy, friendly folks, were no match for such a willful deceiver... We thought Glass was interested in our personal lives, or our struggles with work, and we thought it was because he cared. Actually, it was all about sizing us up and searching for vulnerabilities. What we saw as concern was actually contempt." In actual journalism, professionals have an expectation that others around them are telling the truth. That was why he was always sucking up to people, being everybody's sweet, harmless friend. Also, the fact that it was an editorial piece …show more content…
He played to the bias and perception of the editors and senior staff of the New Republic. In a 1988 article for Vanity Fair, occasional contributor James Wolcott concurred, noting, “The New Republic has a history of shunting women to the sidelines and today injects itself with fresh blood drawn largely from male interns down from Harvard" (Jeet Heer). Glass endorsed negative stereotypes about ethnic and political groups like his fake piece on D.C taxi drivers. It juxtaposed working immigrants with "entitled black Americans who spurned honest work (and chased after white women)" (Jeet Heer). Furthermore, The New Republic's history is steeped in racial ignorance so Glass's fictitious racist tale was just a continuation of articles like a 1915 piece written by Louis B. Wehle, a Kentucky lawyer and friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who argued, “The negro, as a mental survival from slavery, cheerfully accepts the idea of his social inferiority; his problems are born of his shiftlessness, slack morality, and propensity to crimes of violence.” Even the current owner of the magazine Martin Peretz was a known racist. In a 1982 interview with Haaretz, Peretz urged the Palestinians “be turned into just another crushed nation, like the Kurds or the Afghans" (Jeet Heert). Glass's work environment allowed him to fabricate articles that played to an already existing racial