Simon and Schuster published a novel by Stephen Glass - The Fabulist - the story of a young reporter named Stephen Glass whose career as a journalist is built on lies. Here's an excerpt from the novel. Here's the amazon.com page where you can buy a copy. To publicize the book Glass did an interview with "60 Minutes" - here's a transcript of that interview, and here's Virginia Heffernan's Slate review of Glass' TV appearance.

The Fabulist - Simon & Schuster hardcover edition

Lion's Gate Films made a film, Shattered Glass, based on Stephen Glass and his short career as a journalist. Hayden Christensen was cast as Glass, and Peter Sarsgaard was cast as then-New Republic editor Charles Lane - now with the Washington Post - who was a key player in exposing Glass' fabrications. (Christensen's casting remarkably produced few clever comments about talented and innocent young men tempted by the Dark Side, amazingly enough.) Steve Zahn played Adam Penenberg, and Canadian director Ted Kotcheff played Marty Peretz, the publisher of the New Republic. Writer Jonathan Chait, a friend and collaborator of Glass', was apparently given a sex-change in Billy Ray's script (based on Buzz Bissinger's Vanity Fair article), and his character is played by Chloe Sevigny. Ray made his directorial debut with the film. Here's the Internet Movie Database entry on the film. You can buy your copy of Shattered Glass on DVD here.
 

Columnist Patricia Smith of the Boston Globe resigned from the paper after it was discovered that she had made up quotes and sources. Click here to read her mea culpa, here for the Globe's Ombudsman's review of Smith's case,  and here to read an report on the incident by the Globe. Here are a couple of letters from sympathetic readers of Smith's column. Here are reports from the Washington Post, Fox News, CNN,The Oregonian and Salon.

In 1981, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize for "Jimmy's World", the story of an 8-year old heroin addict.  Two days later Cooke admitted that Jimmy did not exist, and Post editor Ben Bradlee returned the award. Investigations revealed that Cooke had also made up her stellar credentials. Humiliated, Cooke lost her job, but later re-emerged selling her story to Hollywood.

Over twenty years ago, veteran journalist Nik Cohn wrote "Tribal Rites Of The New Saturday Night" for New York magazine, an article that inspired the movie "Saturday Night Fever". Years later, he admitted to New York that he had made up the majority of the piece.  Click here for a summary of this incident.

At the Cincinatti Enquirer, reporter Mike Gallagher was fired for stealing voice mail messages in the course of writing a piece on the Chiquita Banana company, aided, it seems, by an employee of the company. The Enquirer has run an apology to the company on its front page. Gallagher's primary crime is that he assured his paper that his sources were obtained in a legal manner. Salon has an essay about why this might be the most important media crisis of the year.

Both CNN and Time magazine reported that the United States had used nerve gas in an attack on Laos during the Vietnam War in an attempt to kill defectors. They based their evidence on the recovered memories of veterans of Operation Tailwind.; They were forced to retract the stories when their sources complained that they had been misquoted.

Here's a really good essay from Salon on CNN, Time, and the crisis in media credibility, from the perspective of a former Time investigative reporter.

Lies and hoaxes have plagued journalism since its birth, perpetrated intentionally or not by a cast ranging from Edgar Allen Poe and H.L. Mencken to Seymour Hersh and Pierre Salinger. Click here for a useful overview of these media deceptions.

The best source for media gossip and news is probably Jim Romaniesko's Media News blog.