"This New Republic Piece? It's a F*cking Sieve."

We have a very exciting special guest for the second episode of Are You Mad At Me?: The real-life Adam Penenberg! Penenberg, portrayed by Steve Zahn in Shattered Glass, was working for an early online outlet called Forbes Digital Tool when his editor, Kambiz Foroohar, demanded to know why he'd been scooped by Stephen Glass on a story about teenage hackers. 

That story, "Hack Heaven," focused on a kid named Ian Restil who had hacked into a "big-time software firm" called Jukt Micronics; instead of prosecuting him, the company hired him to provide digital security. It was part of a nationwide trend in which hackers, often represented by professional agents, were holding companies hostage and extracting huge payments in exchange for protecting them from other hackers.

Of course, the story was completely fabricated—and Penenberg was the one who unraveled the fraud. In our interview, Penenberg tells us what it was like to uncover the story and reflects on what it was like to be a reporter for a digital startup going up against a venerable institution like The New Republic. He also offers his thoughts on why Glass decided to fabricate stories instead of just reporting them, and tells us what it was like talking to Steve Zahn as he was developing his character for the movie. Today, Penenberg is the director of the American Journalism Online Master's program at NYU.

Quotes: "Is it pronounced 'jooked' or 'jucked'?"

"No, it was an 'N.' As in 'Not working.'"

"This guy is toast."

Hosts: Josh Feit and Erica C. Barnett

Edited by: Erica C. Barnett

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Music.

Josh Feit: 0:12

Hello and welcome to the second episode of, are you mad at me, a podcast about the movie shattered glass, which last week, Erica had the mendacity to say she is the number one fan of I am the number one fan of shattered glass. And I'm Josh. On today's show, we're gonna

Erica Barnett: 0:26

And who are you? interview Adam Penenberg, who played a pivotal role in the Shattered Glass story. Penenberg, who's portrayed in the movie by the great Steve Zahn, is the hero of the first half of the film. This is when Penenberg and the team at Forbes fact checks glasses story and discovers, in Penns Berg's own words, it's a fucking sieve without Penn and Berg, it's hard to say if or when Stephen glass would have ever have been out. It has a fabulous and Penn's role also showed the underdog nature of online journalism at the time, and which in some ways still persists to this day today. Penenberg is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, and he's the director of NYU online Masters in Journalism program. Adam, thank you so much for talking with us about this movie, shattered glass. And I think Josh wants to start with a tortured metaphor,

Josh Feit: 1:23

yeah, I just want to say if Steve Zahn was actually Timothy Chalamet, then Adam Penenberg Is Bob Dylan, because Steve Zahn played our guest today, the star of shattered glass. Adam Penenberg.

Adam Penenberg: 1:39

You may, you may have to define, well, we'll get into that. I mean, it was like, wasn't he, like, the, the, you know, they always add at the end

Erica Barnett: 1:49

and, yeah, and with Steve's on, I think it might actually be a with Steve Zahn head

Josh Feit: 1:54

in our minds, because you got, uh, Steven glass, you're the star Adam. Steve's on plays your character like an insouciant, sullen teenager, and he's kind of a comic relief with my favorite line, you know? Yeah, New Republic story. It's a fucking sieve. So I'm wondering is that, is that what you were like in the real in real life, at the time, were you just kind of slouching teenager getting this big assignment?

Adam Penenberg: 2:28

Wow, you know, it's been a long time slouching. You still look like a teenager. Well, I will say it was. You have to realize that no one was more surprised than me. When I worked at Forbes, I went to V pal, so the idea of me working at Forbes was really kind of absurd in some ways, yeah, but at the same time, forbes.com is where I got my start at Forbes, so that was totally different. I mean, I was, I was definitely not a typical hire. I think for them, I had been freelancing for a while, and I have a very independent streak, and so I feel like in the movie, they actually captured it really well. You know, I never wore a suit at Forbes ever. I didn't show up at the office. I rarely showed up at the office. I basically was doing my reporting and stuff, and I was a very different kind of personality, so I think he actually captured it. And I guess, yeah, it may have come across as like a sullen teenager today, but that was definitely pretty accurate. Well,

Erica Barnett: 3:33

you know. And I'm curious, you know, I was working in alt weeklies at the time, and so was Josh, and I have to assume that, you know, sort of like alt week leagues. I mean, Forbes digital tool, as it was called at the time, was kind of an underdog. And, you know, and I wonder the movie makes it sound as though the New Republic is, straightforwardly, not ironically, you know, the in flight magazine of Air Force One, and it's this important magazine, and very stayed and kind of established. Did you feel like the underdog? And how did you see the New Republic at the time? Was it this like venerable, unassailable institution, the way the movie portrays it? We were

Adam Penenberg: 4:10

the underdog at Forbes. The.com wasn't even in the same building as the magazine. Oh, wow. And I actually they wouldn't let me. They wouldn't let me in the magazine building without a pass. So you know, when I go to the library for research, they'd actually have to check into the guard you decided I had a Forbes ID from the.com though, that wasn't good enough, right? And so you have to realize that that was really the way it was, in the sense that we were an upstart.com we were like one of the first independent in the sense of a totally new online news organization. Right after wired and CNET, they were basically very early creating fresh reporting online, as opposed to New York Times, Wall Street Journal were repurposing their content. So we were the total upstarts. We were tiny. Yeah, and our traffic was tiny. And this is 1997 Yeah, 98 right? The traffic was tiny. Realized that when Bill Clinton took the oath of office in 1991 there were less than 100 websites in the world, right? And so that's it grew exponentially, but it had a lot of growing to do. So the.com was a fraction of the size of the print world at the time, and the New Republic was a really famous publication. I'd never read at the time, but I'd heard it was important, and we were forbes.com so that's kind of the upstart, yeah,

Erica Barnett: 5:38

it's funny. I subscribed to wired and I subscribed to the New Republic, I think at the time, in fact, I know I did, because I was really into Stephen glass, actually, as a reader. I just thought he was, you know, this incredible reporter who came up with these great stories. And I have to imagine that like it was a little bit scary. You know, even if you weren't familiar with the New Republic yourself to take on this kind of institutional outlet. Were you? Were you intimidated by that? Okay?

Adam Penenberg: 6:05

I think everybody was afraid of getting it wrong. I mean, it wasn't so much that we were intimidated by the story, right? It was a I think if any of us had just happened to have that luck encounter with the story, like I did, and it happened to be on a beat that I actually knew really well, which was a really obscure beat at the time. So hackers was your beat? The hell was doing that? Yeah, I was covering hackers, cyber crime, in addition to all my E commerce duties. But the real fun stuff was the, you know, the new internet subcultures popping up. Did

Josh Feit: 6:39

you watch the Angela Jolie movie

Adam Penenberg: 6:42

sneakers. It's

Josh Feit: 6:43

called hackers. Oh, you know what? I never saw? I will say, next to shattered glass, shaking my head,

Adam Penenberg: 6:52

I will check it out. No, I never saw it, you

Erica Barnett: 6:56

know? So when you were sort of trying to get this story straight, I've read that, you know the scenes that are in the movie where you and the Forbes team, you know, are checking all the facts one by one. It's pretty true to life. And I'm curious, what do you remember about that moment when you realized, or, you know, started to suspect, that this story was made up? Well,

Adam Penenberg: 7:17

I would be lying to say that I knew that he had made it up even at the beginning of this process. And in fact, I thought it was quite possible that he'd been duped. But the only problem with that theory was that no one was taking credit, so that seemed unlikely. And so I was truly flummoxed, but I will say that the moment that I that I took the name of the company and put it into the Yahoo search I did. There was no Google at the time that launched, like, six months later, nothing popped up. I knew something was really wrong with the story. I mean, obviously the company that they wrote about didn't pop up on the internet at all, even in 1998 that was kind of an absurd idea. And so that at that moment, I knew, well, that's not right. And so it didn't take a lot of urging for me to start like, well, let me, let me look at some other facts. And when other facts didn't pan out quickly, like that, I'm like, I took a whole bunch of stuff and started looking at it, and that's when it really, you know, started to pick up energy. And then people could tell this story was brewing, and

Josh Feit: 8:23

that was your first move, right? Your first move was popping juked into what did you say? AOL, yahoo, yahoo. That was your first move. So right off the bat, this story was suspicious to you. Yeah, it

Adam Penenberg: 8:37

was very suspicious. Well, okay, the other thing that was suspicious to me was I read the story after my editor, you know, chewed me out for not having written it myself. I didn't recognize anything in the story like, you know, the fact that, okay, the story was really crazy, all right. It starts off with this kid talking to these executives, and they're negotiating an extortion deal, because he had hacked their company, and then in order for them to get rid of him, he would tell them how he did it, in exchange for money. And they were offering, you know, huge amounts of money, a car, in some cases, a Miata, you know, I don't know stuff like, that's crazy stuff. And he had an agent, a former NBA agent, right? Was his representative. Hackers have agents. And, okay, even the thing that there was a hacker convention in Bethesda, Maryland. I'm like, there are hacker conventions in Las Vegas. But I and I actually, like, one of my first questions to hackers I knew was like, was there a conference in Bethesda, Maryland in the last six months, or that, no, right? I mean, stuff like that. And so obviously it wasn't hard to start striking out. And the more that you struck out, the more that you realize that there's something wrong with the story, because you expected a fact to check out, but not one checked out. Yeah.

Erica Barnett: 9:59

I mean, there's. There's just, there's something. I mean, I think one of the reasons that that both Josh and I really like this movie, among many, is just that sort of vicarious gratification of watching, you know, you played by Steve Zahn, figuring this out and just just finding this kind of domino cascade of facts that just don't check out at all. I think you've, you've also said that, you know, you're not trying to be a journalism cop or anything, and that wasn't your role, but just, it's just very, very vicariously exciting to see a big story like that falling apart so quickly.

Adam Penenberg: 10:30

Yeah, it was. It was such an odd experience, because, as you guys know, right, like you fact check something, or you check into something, you know, you expect certain things to check out basic facts. I had never, ever had a piece of journalism not check out like even, even there were no commas or periods or SEBI Colas that were actually you could trust in the story, it seemed.

Josh Feit: 10:54

I want to ask. There's the famous scene in the movie where you're, you're, you know, you're interviewing them. You guys both have the tape recorders rolling, and you've written that there's a moment where you kind of felt sorry for him, when you kind of realize he's he's cooked. And I'm wondering if, in retrospect, you now realize that maybe he was working his magic and his duplicity on you. Do you think that he was, he understood that he was cooked, and he was kind of using his sociopathic charms to make you feel sorry for him, or that he was, that he was kind of playing you

Adam Penenberg: 11:32

well, undoubtedly, he was trying to play us. That was, that was, there was no doubt of that, I mean, but I think the the issue was I felt bad only because I knew his career was going to be over in journalism, I couldn't even believe that Chuck Lane had actually allowed me to interview him that way. And it wasn't only until later that Chuck told me that, you know, he actually needed me to do that because he couldn't get to the bottom of the problem, but he knew that we were so far along, and that's fine. You know, it was all we were all just trying to do the best we possibly could under very trying circumstances. I have to say, so I did feel sorry for him, only in that way. But I also have to tell you, it's like, it was thrilling, because I don't know, it's like, you know, let's say you have a theory about something, and suddenly you see the theory play out like we had a whiteboard with every single quote, unquote fact in the story listed, and I was going through them one after the other. And, you know, obviously it did. We couldn't even get past the opening paragraph before he was completely flummoxed, you know, because, you know, I'm saying, Were you in the room with the boy? Yes, well, but it sounds like you're in the room with the boy. But how could you have known that? Well, no, I wasn't in the room with the boy. You weren't in the room with the boy. Well, wait a minute, tell me about like, how do you know about this? Oh, well, I heard it from, wait a minute, that's, that's not who told you that. Well, I don't you know things like that. It was, it was as if a piece had never been edited or fact checked. I I could not understand it. So we went through the entire story. It was an hour or something long of going through every fact so there was a thrill almost in like and as part of that, he was also lying and throwing out fake information and evidence. And so, you know, he sent fake business cards, he sent, you know, fake URLs to websites. He sent fake emails, set up fake voicemail.

Josh Feit: 13:34

This is during the interview. This is before

Adam Penenberg: 13:38

the interview, I guess, and right after So, and we have to check all that. So the business card comes in, I gotta, well, it looks fake, because it looks like is, and it looks like Kinkos and, you know, and I've got to check everything on the card. That takes time, you know. And it's like every step of the way he was throwing more banana peels at us. But we were relentless

Erica Barnett: 13:59

in that scene. Steven is, you know, Hayden Christensen playing Steven is kind of fumbling around in the background and flailing and, you know, looking for his fake notes and coming up with fake numbers that are the wrong area code and stuff. Was that was his demeanor that bumbling or like, what was his demeanor like during that conversation? Well,

Adam Penenberg: 14:20

it was really incredibly calm at first, which I was surprised, you know, but he seemed kind of calm about it. I'll tell you something about that scene that in the movie that's really interesting in that I actually went up to Montreal to watch filming, and I got to watch that, that scene being filmed. And so there was this really beautiful moment during rehearsal. Maybe they were doing a take, and it didn't seem that Hayden Christensen got exactly what Billy Ray, the director wanted. And so I overheard Billy take Hayden Christensen aside and say, I want you to play. This scene, as if you really, really believe what you're saying. And it transformed it, because then it seemed like he really came to life and embodied the character after that. I thought it was like one of the most genius little tips from a director. I, you know, I couldn't imagine, you know, doing that. So it had a profound impact. So I feel like that, that he really captured that essence in the film.

Erica Barnett: 15:27

Do you have, you know, over the years, I know you've, you've talked about this story a bazillion times, and you've talked about the movie, I'm sure a bazillion more. Have you developed like a psychological profile of Stephen glass? I mean, do you think he's a sociopath? What is the case of Stephen glass? You know, according to Adam Penn D,

Adam Penenberg: 15:49

there's no envy. I I've, uh, I work in academia, and I don't even have a master's. I have never heard a why, like, I've never heard him say why he did it, not in any remotely convincing manner, and I find that kind of disturbing. But maybe it's normal, maybe it's a psychological condition, I don't know, but it seems to me that you would be able to say why you didn't just fabricate a story a little bit. Okay, it's not like you, you inserted a quote, or you even made up a fact, or you made up a character. He made up dozens, dozens of stories in whole or in part. And the the it's, it's, to me, that's stunning over years. And it happened not just at the New Republic, okay, it happened at George magazine, Harper's also, you know, he even at the University of Pennsylvania, you know, where he was on the college newspaper, they found that he had fabricated stories in college. It began then, all right, and so I want to know why, and until I hear a why, I don't know, but to me that that's truly disturbing, and the way that he handled me, which was to admit to a smaller crime every time, oh, I didn't, I didn't check that fact, or, oh, you know, I can't find that number. Or, you know, I may made a mistake, you know, it's he would cop to a lesser crime to protect the big crime. And he it was a thing that he did during the bar reviews he had where he was, you know, trying to to get permission to track his law in New York and then California. And, you know, they wouldn't allow him because he had committed acts of moral turpitude, he lied. And so that's a rule for them, I guess, and so they wouldn't allow him to practice. But during that process, more information came out, more stories he had fabricated came out. During that process, when he had to come clean. And so he didn't come clean before then my question would be, again, why? And without a why, an answer to the question, why? I don't feel any of us can, can really tell you what happened, and can really judge, you know, whether he's, you know, socio sociopathic or not. But

Erica Barnett: 18:17

yeah, I mean, it just feels so unfathomable, you know. And I can even, like, I can understand, like somebody in college trying to get a grade, you know, to cheat on a test, like making something up, but just the the extent of it. I mean, I've Josh knows. I mean, I'm a little bit of a scholar of Stephen glass at this point, just by virtue of, you know, reading all his stories so many times, because I, like I said, I was a big fan. And it just, it just baffles me, too. It's bizarre. You feel betrayed. Well, I feel, I feel betrayed, but I also feel a little bit better about myself at the time because I was, I was also a struggling journalist, or I was a struggling journalist, and, you know, and it was very frustrating to see like this kid who was not that much older than me at the time, you know, doing all this amazing work. And I mean, Josh, we were talking about this, and Josh, you said, you know, he was an okay writer of fiction, I think, which is, which is, why that that story about being a phone psychic and Harper's appealed to me so much. It was, it was an actually good work of fiction. And I don't know if he was, if he was actually a good writer or not. I guess if we talk to Chuck lane, we can find

Adam Penenberg: 19:18

out. Well, I'll tell you, okay, but Well, if you read the stories in the New Republic and compare them to the book The writer, oh, yeah, I haven't read his book, right? He was your books don't get edited very much unless you hire your own editor. But magazine articles did for listeners.

Erica Barnett: 19:33

He wrote a fiction book called The fabulous that was basically a thinly veiled version of an autobiography, and it was very poorly received, got a big advance at the time.

Adam Penenberg: 19:42

And again, my point would be, when he was supposed to write fact, he wrote fiction. And then when it was time to actually say what happened again, wrote fiction. Yeah. And so to me again, why

Josh Feit: 19:57

I want to ask about. You guys did all this incredible work, or shoe leather work to get this story. And you get on the phone with Chuck Lane in sort of your victorious moment, and he tells you he's giving the story to the Washington Post. And I'm just wondering if you can describe that moment and how you felt about what was happening there.

Adam Penenberg: 20:22

Oh, man, that was, I was out of body experience because, you know, it was Sunday afternoon, late, and, you know, I knew I'd have to go back to the office Monday morning and continue this work. Right? The way it worked was we got to Friday afternoon after the conference call, and then we then faced a question, do we publish now, or do we wait? And we had a meeting, and I had a meeting with David cherbuck, who was the publisher of the site, and can be photo heart, who was the editor, and me, and we disagreed on what to do. You know me? I wanted to publish now because I didn't want to lose the scoop. I felt like we had enough. We knew the story was bullshit, that not a single fact checked out. They admitted none of the facts checked out. I said, we run the story and then we figure out what went wrong. And David sherbuck, to his credit, and I love him for this. David sherbuck said, No, we're not going to publish because we have to be better than them. We have to be better than print. Right now, people look down their noses at online journalists. I know it's such a strange thing to talk about, but back in the late 90s, there was this schism. There were people like me who got on online early. I had come from print. We all did, but they seemed to forget that. And when we got online, there was this view of us that we were inferior because you're not, you're not in print, though they could never explain why. It was always like, Oh, you internet guys, you have these. You have these, you know, these relentless deadlines. And I'm like, so does the AP in many arguments. You know, we all come from print. You know, it's journalism, right? And they didn't believe that, but there was that belief at the time. And so David sherbuck, you know, who was the founder of forbes.com he was the guy that built it, you know? And he said, we're not going to publish until we figure out what went wrong, so you get back here Monday morning and we'll keep going until we figure it out. And he said, he said something that was so interesting, and it proved not to be true, but it sounded really reasonable, which was he goes, like, listen, they're not going to tell anyone because it's hugely embarrassing. So you don't have to worry about someone stealing your story. And I thought that doesn't sound so right to me, but okay as his his sight and and also I realized he was right. But then Sunday afternoon, around 430 or so, Chuck Lane calls me at home and tells me that Stephen glass had confessed to concocting the entire story from whole cloth. Was the term that Charles had used, Chuck had used. And then he said he had also confessed to two others. I said, Whoa, that's so I started taking notes, and then he said, and I also told Howie Kurtz of The Washington Post, and he's going to run in the Bulldog addition to the of the Washington Post tonight at 10 o'clock. I knew it was 10 o'clock because that's when the Bulldog came out. So and he told me this, and I said, why? And then, you know, he he said, I had to protect the New Republic. I had to do what was best in the magazine. And I got really angry, and I said a lot of things that, man, it was, it was obscene, but I basically told him, You

Erica Barnett: 23:44

can swear on this podcast, by

Adam Penenberg: 23:46

the way, God Damn man. All right, yeah, I said this is the reason why you're in such a fucking mess right now, because you fucking don't understand the Internet. I can get a story up in 20 fucking minutes, and when I do, I'm gonna tell everyone that it was your ass that made this happen because you couldn't fucking edit. I said, Look at this. How many stories do we have to look at? Then we're gonna find how many more that you were the boss of. So fuck you. I said, send me their fucking press I told you, send me your fucking press release, and I'm gonna ram it up your ass, and then I'm gonna write this story. Fuck you. And then he faxed me, and then I called my editor up, and it was 1998 of the internet, and he lived at Union Square, and we had to walk to the office to post the story, because you didn't have remote access, you know, to anything then. And then we get to the office, and I'm, like, furiously. I already had a story written. I had to redo the top, you know, but, and I wasn't going to do anything. I mean, Chuck Lane called me and I yelled at him, and can be he's was much calmer, and can be his photo, or the editor took the call in his office, but left the door open so I could hear and basically got chuck to, you know, give. A statement for the piece, and so, and then we had a lot of tech trouble getting it up, because it was 1998 and what we did, and then, you know, we looked at each other, just the two of us in the office, and we're like, and we wrote three stories. Like, in no time. I wrote two of them can't be used with the other. And it was basically the hard news piece, a background piece, and then Cambridge wrote an editorial comment on it, and we got it out there. And then Howie Kurtz is Washington Post story came out at 10 o'clock. And so it was this strange thing that overnight, of course, on the internet, you can imagine, like a online publication took down a print publication. All the internet people were like, Whoa, awesome. And then the print people right? It's like, and then suddenly, Howie Kurt says this great story The Washington Post is like, how he didn't even mention our names frantically. He got my position wrong at Forbes. He didn't bother calling anybody the story. Basically, Chuck handed him the story, and he published it. And it was just like, okay, like, okay, like, that's journalism, I guess, but we were angry about it. But then it got down to a really odd thing, where credit was involved now, and it seemed to Forbes that the credit was being taken away by another publication. And this angered the management at Forbes. And so they decided to do something about it. And so they got their publicist, who we liked the publicist, he was a great guy, Ray Healy. And Ray said he called the Associated Press because the Associated Press had run the Washington Post story on the wire. And he said, If you want to talk to the guy who really broke the story. Should talk to Penn and Berg. They called. I did an interview, and then that AP story blew up, and then suddenly my phone is ringing off the hook and my email and I'm being, you know, deluged with with interview requests. I didn't, you know, I just walked in of, like, nurseries, and then suddenly I'm on CNN doing an interview. It was just the facts we didn't, you know, we weren't, like, beating our chests. We just wanted the fact that, look, we did the work. Your

Erica Barnett: 27:13

character is sort of the hero of the first half or so of the movie, and then chuck lane as the hero of the second half or a little more. And I'm wondering, you know, do you think his role was embellished to make, you know, to make him sort of a more positive figure? None of the stuff that you're talking about was in the movie, obviously. And, you know, and from your telling, it sounds like he acted like kind of a

Adam Penenberg: 27:33

dick, you know, I can't judge what he was doing, because, you know, what the guy was fighting for his life. Okay, here is actually kind of a funny coincidence, by the way, you know, Marty Perez owned the New Republic. And what's so funny is, you know, Marty Perez has quite the reputation. But I got to know Marty Perez in recent years. You know, Marty is notoriously a hard gas, and so I just having gotten to know more I can, I have a lot of sympathy for what Chuck must have been going through. Like, look, they didn't pay a lot of money, right? He was fighting for his job. He was put in an impossible position by Marty Peretz, and I felt sorry for him. And so I don't really, I don't think Chuck did anything untoward, you know, I mean, like, you know, he's playing hardball, and so were we. You know, I don't fault him for passing it on to Howie Kurtz. I was really pissed. I was immature, too. I mean, I think I was justified in my anger. But, you know, he didn't owe me anything, and I certainly didn't know him anything either. So I don't think Chuck did anything wrong. I feel like for the movie, though, yes, Billy Ray would be the guy to talk to about how he approached that. But so I don't really know a lot about how Chuck, you know, was at the New Republic. I do know that it was accurate in the sense of, like he was really dealing with a staff mutiny, which is, you know, amazing. And it was, it was, must have been incredibly uncomfortable Yeah, you

Erica Barnett: 29:01

know, the movie really gets across what a horrible situation. You know, he was in as well. I did notice that Marty Peretz, I believe, testified in favor of Stephen glass in his attempt to get his law license in California. Is that

Adam Penenberg: 29:17

right? Yeah, he did. You know, Ed Marty really believes it. You know, again, I'm not like, I don't talk to the Marty a lot. I've talked to him a couple times. I have to say it was like, and He's much older now, so it's but, yeah, he testified on behalf of Steve. He really felt like he was a changed man, which was very surprising, I think, for people who had been around that, you

Erica Barnett: 29:38

know, rereading a lot of these stories now, you know, just as a as a journalist and somebody who kind of checks facts in my in my mind a lot when I'm reading stories, it feels so obvious that a lot of the details were questionable. I mean, both in, you know, hack heaven, but also in a lot of the other stories that you fabricated, you in whole or in part. Why do you think that so much of this stuff got through? I mean. Would some of this stuff not have seemed outlandish at the time, you know, or should a fact checker have caught this stuff?

Adam Penenberg: 30:06

Okay, I don't blame the fact checkers, right? I'm sure the fact checkers caught it. I feel like they weren't allowed to report it, though, right? Because, look, let's take hack heaven. It turns out that hack heaven was the first story that he made up completely, like all of it, every word before that, he had been making up portions, large amounts of it, sometimes, like basing it on fake stuff, like the Monica, you know, souvenir bit, and, you know, the psychics, I'm sure, but this one was, like, completely made up, not even real people in it, like not even a real expert to talk to, nothing real. And so it's what's interesting is a lot of people over the years have told me I knew he was making up stuff. I knew it, you know. But here's the thing, if you take hack Evan, all right, all we did was quickly fact check it. That's it, right? It wasn't like we had superpowers here. He didn't even have a company that you could back up. I mean, that you could find nothing in the story. So it's to me, it was a total failure of the editors. How did this piece get past I don't want to bury shock, but whoever edited this piece, how did it get past them? If this were forbes.com or where you were working, I guarantee you, your editor would have read the story and said to you, probably like, Why have I never heard of this big time software firm in California? What do they make? Who are their clients? How big are they? Are they public? Are they private? Where are they based? That's just that question. The next question would be, hackers. Have agents. Where are these agents? Who are they? Is they are listed, you know, right? I mean, they're a basic fact check 101, it failed. I am sure the other ones did too, because the fact checkers found it, but they weren't allowed to report it, because Stephen glass was the head fact checker. So you have a power game going on. First of all, and he again, I this is hearsay, so I don't know where this is true, but it sounds true that he would manipulate it so that he understood how fact checking can have holes in it, right? Like, ultimately, you're going to get to the point where the only one to know something is the reporter, because he or she I witnessed it, so you have to accept the reporters notes, or I was there. The source won't confirm it, but I have it in my nose. They'll accept that, right. There are, you know, there has to be certain give and take with that. And so he used that to full effect. And so I don't understand how this got passed a junior editor.

Josh Feit: 32:39

And you've, you've never gone back and sort of, in the years, talked to people involved and asked that question, or just not something you want to spend your time with.

Adam Penenberg: 32:47

I don't know. I mean, I'm not friends with the new people, like, I don't know them very well. It would seem kind of weird, like, why am I on this story? Still, I have to be honest, I wrote the one story, and then years later, oh, I wrote something for my alumni newspaper because they asked. And then I didn't really write anything, until 10 years later, I wrote something, you know, and so I guess it's, it's just, I'm not a media critic, and I'm not a media reporter. And so for me, it was just like, it was a tech story, you know, it was about hackers. It was about, it was about, like, you know, extortion rings. It was about hackers, having agents and brokering million dollar deals with the companies that they that was the story that you know, Adam,

Josh Feit: 33:27

you're, you're obviously, maybe biased. But I'm wondering, as a journalism professor, where do you rate shatter glass among all the journalism movies out there? Oh, I

Adam Penenberg: 33:37

don't know. The comparison thing. I'm not kind of into right? Because, you know, Shadow glass is a charming piece about a much simpler time, and I love the movie. I would love the movie anyway. My kids loved it. They watched it. They're like, Oh, that's really fun, right? Spotlight is a great movie. I really love spotlight. And I often tell people like, the difference between spotlight and shadow glass. They took down the Catholic Church and All the President's Men. They took down a president, and we took down a lie. There's

Erica Barnett: 34:10

something really satisfying about that small story to me, though,

Josh Feit: 34:15

yeah, and rich Nixon was a liar. It's

Adam Penenberg: 34:18

true. It was, uh, all of and you know, none of us in the in there ever thought, you know, movie would be made about this, but I don't know. I tell you, like, if I were going to do a top 10 list of journalism movies, I would want to do it differently. I wanted to do it based on the journalism in the movie. All the President's Men would be on that list. Spotlight would be on that list. I think shattered class would be on that list. Right? It brings you into the world of journalism, the best of what journalism can be. And I don't mean like, what we did is all that important, but I will say that it's we were the best that we could have been at that moment, and that we actually became inspirational to a lot of people online. And you know, at the end of the movie, it's, no, I don't think it's. A coincidence that at the end of the movie, you know, they call it a watershed event for online journalism, because it was because we were the ugly step child of journalism at the time, and suddenly we weren't anymore, because an online publication took down a print publication, and it changed the balance of power. And then we got really arrogant. We're like, Hey, we're gonna tail is gonna be wagging the dog pretty soon. And now it is, judging

Erica Barnett: 35:28

from you wrote an article, I think, for Pando daily, or maybe Fast Company, maybe both, just kind of about the experience after some years had passed. And judging from the way that you wrote about the experience, you really do not like Stephen glass, and he comes across as, and I'm not saying that in a personal way, but just a kind of what he represents for journalism, he comes across in the movie is just so detestable. But I feel like, over time, you know, there's a weird way in which he's become this kind of sympathetic character. And there was, you know, a story about him and his wife that came out a few years ago that really portrayed him in a sympathetic light. How have your feelings about him changed over time? Or have they? I

Adam Penenberg: 36:08

don't have a lot of feelings about him. I'm not one of those people that feels like he shouldn't be able to earn a living, like I always thought they should let him practice law, because it's he's very transparent about what he did, and also to be honest with you, like, since, when is lying like disqualify you from Sure, right? I don't know. That's how I felt about it. I think like a person has to be allowed to earn a living after something, right? I feel that I maybe I'm so scared that one day be canceled and I will never be able to earn another dollar. I don't know, but I, I would never want any harm like that coming to anybody. And so I felt like, you know, I never wrote anything with this, like, in a way where I was feeling any sanctuary, or something like that, you know, I feel a lot of sadness about it, but I guess I'm angry because he made it so fucking hard for the rest of us, you know? I mean, okay, I'll tell you something that really pisses me off. I got to interview Jason Blair not long ago, because Jason has truly turned around his life. Go look him up. Dude is doing important work, and he talks about it, what he did in a way that was like, I take full responsibility. I had a drug addiction, I had undiagnosed bipolar disorder, I was put under enormous stress, but I did wrong, and he's very open about it. And then Jason Blair told me, the difference between me and Stephen glass is that I had a mental condition and a drug addiction, and exactly what was wrong with him. And so that's kind of like this thing where, again, I keep coming back to the why, but he did grave damage in 1998 when the glass story broke, a certain number of people distrusted media five years later, to the day, almost Jason Blair story broke in the New York Times, huge. Bigger than glass, huge thing. And The New York Times had sent editors and reporters to re report Jason's stories, and they had interviewed one of the sources, where, in the story they had he had described the view from their front porch, I think, in West Virginia, or something like that. And it was all wrong. And so the reporters asked, Why didn't you say anything when you read quotes from you like descriptions that weren't at all accurate. And the guy said, I just thought, that's what journalists do. I felt like five years earlier, you would not have gotten that reaction.

Erica Barnett: 38:51

Does and does that feel? Does that feel quite now? Oh yeah,

Adam Penenberg: 38:55

feels very quaint nowadays. I feel like like. So what do you mean?

Josh Feit: 39:00

You know, you've talked about really, really profoundly how this changed journalism, changed online journalism, but did this change your personal life or your career, you know, and as kind of a follow up to that, you know, do you stay in touch with anyone who was involved? And I'm just wondering how this, this whole thing, affected you.

Adam Penenberg: 39:19

So, yeah, things changed, but it was also stressful. I went from, you know, online reporter that no one had ever heard of, except for the 10% of the population I was digesting online news at the time, or whatever it was, and then suddenly a lot of people knew my name. And it was weird, you've

Erica Barnett: 39:40

kids. They've seen the movie. What do they think about the portrayal, Steve zahn's portrayal of you? They

Adam Penenberg: 39:46

thought it was pretty funny, I gotta say, when Billy Ray called me to tell me that they had cast someone to play me, first of all, it's very strange, right? They sent me the script to read before I could agree to doing life rights. You know? Life rights, right. If they want to portray in a movie, for some reason, they have to pay you something or get your life rights. So I said, Great. And so Lionsgate offered some amount of money, not that much. And so I had my agent say, hey, just for a little more, see what happens. And so he said, Okay. And then he calls me back in like 10 minutes, and he says, Lions Gate has an answer for you. Ready? I said, Yes. He goes. They said, take the money or we'll change your name.

Unknown: 40:29

Wow, that's hardball.

Adam Penenberg: 40:33

I said, Well, I'll take the money

Erica Barnett: 40:36

there. Well, the budget for the whole movie was a million dollars. So, you know, it's credible that they, like, just have the money to spend. So I read

Adam Penenberg: 40:44

the script and realized, well, this is all good for me, because at least I'm not on the bad side. So I, so I agreed to do that. You know the character when he called me up and he told me that it was Steve Zahn, I was, I was on my honeymoon, and I'm like, I'm so glad I didn't say to Billy Ray anything. I said, like, Oh, that's wonderful. I called my brother in law, who is he knows everything about movies, and I said, Steven van, Steve Zahn, the guy from Springsteen span. He goes like, no idiot, it's okay. So they cast the guy who always plays drug addicted lovable losers, play me. So he had to call me and we were gonna get pasta together. He said, I guess when people like carbs back then. So he calls me up, and I got a voicemail from him, which was one of the funniest things I had ever heard in my life. And I wish I had saved it, because Steve's on, at least my exposure to him is he is exactly the character she plays. First of all, his portrayal was so good, right? Because he's, he's a great I love that is just, but he didn't want to meet me. He didn't really care what I look like. And I thought that's great, because, you know, I'm the serious thing here in the script. And he got, like, comic relief. If he adds some comedy, that would be nice, right? Right? And so he would have the greatest questions. So, you know, because they all have, they take a long one, and they're like, so, like, when you were, like, investigating this asshole, and you do that, like, it was just full of bullshit, I'm weighing my coupe. What's the what were you wearing? It was his first question. So I just said, oh, and I told him I was very informal, like the.com was less formal than the magazine, but I come in rip blue jeans, a jean jacket. I come in the black T shirts. Mostly, I never dressed up, and I was impossible. Anyway, I show up to the set on Saturday glass in Montreal. I'm wearing blue jeans and a black T shirt, and they tell me that's exactly what song was in the movie.

Erica Barnett: 42:54

Amazing. This has just been fantastic. So much. It's been so much fun to talk to you. Oh,

Adam Penenberg: 43:02

well, thank you. It was really fun to haven't talked about this stuff in a while.

Erica Barnett: 43:06

Thanks for listening to are you mad at me a shattered glass Podcast. I'm Erica C Barnett, and my co host is Josh Veit, and we will see you back here next month. You