There are some crimes of journalism so egregious they admit no rehabilitation. It appears, judging by her current career profile, that Judith Miller committed one with her Iraq war cheerleading on the front page of the New York Times in 2002. Then there were the fabrications and plagiarism her erstwhile colleague, Jayson Blair, got into the Times a year later, which the paper proudly dissected in print two years before parting ways with Miller.
Not all such misadventures in journalism end as poorly. That’s the reminder delivered this week by a pair of headlines heralding the reinvention of two formerly disgraced writers. They are Jonah Lehrer, who lost his New Yorker job in 2012 in a plagiarism and fabulism scandal, and Stephen Glass, who lost his place with the New Republic in 1998 after it was revealed that he had made up details or whole stories in a host of articles.
On Monday, the New Republic published a 7,000-word piece by one of Glass’s former colleagues and close friends that is both an announcement of her having forgiven him and a compelling invitation for others to do the same. On Tuesday, news broke that Lehrer had scored a book deal with an imprint of Penguin Random House for an undisclosed sum.
Of this small family of misbegotten journalists, it is Lehrer who appears to have survived best, or to have been slowed down least. The title announced on Tuesday, The Digital Mind: How We Think and Behave Differently on Screens, is the second book deal for Lehrer to be announced in the two years since his scandal came to light. The first book, which was reportedly about the redemptive power of love, was signed up in 2012 but has yet to materialize.
“Jonah Lehrer is one of the most gifted nonfiction writers of his generation,” said his latest publisher, Adrian Zackheim, in a statement first obtained by the Associated Press. “No responsible publisher could entirely overlook his past mistakes, but the prospect of working with him was also fantastically appealing.” The statement echoed one put out by Simon and Shuster publisher Jonathan Karp after he took on the love book in 2012. “Jonah Lehrer is an unusually talented writer,” Karp said. “We believe in second chances.”
Lehrer’s sin was to make up quotes for at least one of his books and to recycle material that he had previously published elsewhere into his blog posts for the New Yorker. He was reckless enough, in print, to put words in the mouth of Bob Dylan, which for some people is tantamount to taking a markup pen to a red-letter edition of the Bible.
Glass was by far the more enterprising fabulist. Across a series of articles in the mid-1990s, he made up quotes, he made up characters and he made up companies. Then he made up notebook entries and business cards to substantiate his fabrications. He persisted in his deceptions to his bosses’ faces. He allowed colleagues to go out on a limb defending him.
That’s part of what makes Monday’s New Republic piece, “Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry”, by former colleague Hanna Rosin, so powerful. Rosin reunites with Glass after 12 years, when she is called to testify about what he did before a California court weighing whether to grant him a legal license. (It didn’t.) He now works in a non-lawyerly capacity at a personal-injury law firm in Beverly Hills.
For every sense she has of a renewed trust between them, Rosin wrestles with a suspicion that Glass is just out to burn her one more time. “I heard this and alarm bells went off,” she writes of his current job. “The work sounded humane but also possibly manipulative. It sounded like crafting masterful stories in order to get the results you want.”
In the end, however, Rosin punts – on the side of forgiveness:
Some people he has wronged will never forgive him. This doesn’t mean that the truth about Steve is elusive, or subjective. It means that forgiveness is a choice, and I decided to make it.
