TOW #3 Shattered Glass by Buzz Bissinger from Vanity Fair 1998

Wow. I have to admit, I was quite disappointed in this article. I feel like the Stephen Glass controversy deserved so much more coverage from Vanity Fair. In fact, I feel like it kind of glossed over the whole scandal (despite the fact that it was incredibly interesting) and focused on the life and reasoning of Glass. To be honest, the article didn't do such a great job of that either. It was short, not very factual, and it all seemed crammed together to fit a deadline. What could have been such a great exposé was simply a great big disappointment. Since I took journalism last year, I’ve been very interested in the whole situation (what with the lies, the drama, the obscenity (in a very legal and school appropriate manner, just to be clear)) and to read this article, the article that supposedly spurred the movie Shattered Glass, has been a goal of mine for some time. As a follower of the scandal, the article did not meet expectations, and I will continue to search for better exposés on the scandal itself. This article was simply not what I was looking for. The author seemed much to focused on style and rhetoric to effectively depict the heart of he story, skirting around its edges like a man who simply didn’t have the facts. The only mildly interesting thing that I took away from this crap, full of useless imagery and what I took to be an appeal to pathos, or at least some sort of human curiosity, was that in his past, Glass was involved with a play group who once did a piece on a “Washington journalist caught up in conspiracy and corruption” (p1). The author even managed to ruin that though, because instead of simply letting you think about that, coming to your own conclusion, he literally spells out what it meant on the next page. To me, as both an interested reader and a writer, I felt this made it seem as though the author was disrespecting his audience, saying that they weren’t smart enough to come up with this conclusion on their own. I was offended, and will be looking elsewhere for more information on the Glass controversy as this article was insufficient and poorly done.