Disgraced journalist Stephen Glass was denied a law license today by the California Supreme Court, which ruled that the “pervasive and documented liar” is not quite rehabilitated enough. “Many of his efforts from the time of his exposure in 1998 until the 2010 hearing … seem to have been directed primarily at advancing his own well-being rather than returning something to the community,” says the decision.
The Shattered Glass subject first applied to the New York bar in 2002, but he screwed that up: Glass “exaggerated his cooperation with the journals that had published his work and failed to supply a complete list of the fabricated articles that had injured others.” California is not having it, either, citing “hypocrisy and evasiveness” in his bar hearing testimony.
More shadiness from Glass, according to the decision:
Concerning his decision to list only 20 articles containing fabrications in his New York bar application materials, Glass emphasized that he had not been asked for a complete list of articles containing fabrications […]
He explained at the California hearing that the customer service agent to whom he attributed the anti-Semitic slur in [the article] Deliverance was a “made-up character,” and so, he insisted, the article did not harm a real person. When pressed, he admitted that the article could have caused harm to the customer service agent the company determined had assisted him, and to the company.
On his side, Glass had his former boss, New Republic editor Marty Peretz, testify that it wasn’t that bad anyway:
[Peretz] blamed himself and, even more, the magazine’s editors for encouraging Glass to write zany, shocking articles and for failing to recognize the improbability of some of Glass’s stories. He found the harm of the scandal to the magazine to be minimal. He had renewed social contact with Glass in the past few years and believed that Glass had been harshly treated. He would not rule out hiring Glass again as a journalist.
So there’s always journalism.
