Are You Mad At Me? Episode 2: We Talk to Adam Penenberg, Who Uncovered the Deception at the Heart of "Shattered Glass"

[00:00:00] Hey Seattle Nice listeners, Erica here. We're dropping the second episode of Are You Mad At Me in your feed. It's a limited series podcast I'm doing with my friend and Publicola co-founder Josh Feit about the movie Shattered Glass. If you haven't seen Shattered Glass yet, it's about a major journalism scandal that took place in the 90s when a reporter named Stephen Glass was caught fabricating dozens of stories for the New Republic and other print magazines. The ruse started falling apart when a reporter for an online startup publication,

[00:00:30] Adam Penenberg started looking into one of Glass's stories about a teenage hacker and realized nothing about the piece held up. We had Adam on our show to talk about what it was like to uncover the story and what he thinks about the film where he's portrayed by Steve Zahn. If you like this preview of Are You Mad At Me, please subscribe to the show wherever you get podcasts. New episodes come out every month. Thanks for listening.

[00:01:02] 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 who are you? And I'm Josh. On today's show, we're going to 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,

[00:01:30] is the hero of the first half of the film. This is when Penenberg and the team at Forbes fact-checks Glass's story and discovers, in Penenberg's own words, it's a fucking sieve. Without Penenberg, it's hard to say if or when Stephen Glass would have ever been outed as a fabulist. And Penenberg's role also showed the underdog nature of online journalism at the time, which in some ways still persists to this day.

[00:01:56] Today, Penenberg is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, and he's the director of NYU's Online Masters in Journalism program. Adam, thank you so much for talking with us. And I think Josh wants to start with a tortured metaphor.

[00:02:12] Yeah. I just want to say, if Steve Zahn was actually Timothee Chalamet, then Adam Penenberg is Bob Dylan, because Steve Zahn played our guest today, the star of Shattered Glass, Adam Penenberg. You may have to define star. Well, we'll get into that. I mean, it was like, wasn't he like the, you know, they always add at the end of Steve Zahn? Yeah. And with Steve Zahn, I think it might actually be a with Steve Zahn.

[00:02:41] So with Adam Penenberg. In our minds, because you got Stephen Glass, you're the star. Adam, Steve Zahn plays your character like an insouciant, sullen teenager. And he's kind of the comic relief with my favorite line, you know, yeah, New Republic story. It's a fucking sieve. Um, so I'm wondering, is that, is that what you were like, uh, in the real, in real life at the time?

[00:03:10] Were you this kind of, uh, slouching teenager, uh, getting this big assignment? Wow. You know, it's been a long time. Uh, slouching teenager. You still look like a teenager. Well, I will say it was, you have to realize that, uh, no one was more surprised than me when I worked at Forbes. Forbes. I went to Reed College. So the idea of me working at Forbes was really kind of absurd in some ways.

[00:03:38] But at the same time, Forbes.com is where I got my start at Forbes. So that was totally different. I mean, I was, um, I was definitely not a, uh, 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, uh, I didn't show up at the office. I rarely showed up at the office.

[00:04:08] I basically was doing my reporting and stuff. And, uh, 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 solid teenager today. Uh, but that, that was definitely pretty accurate. Well, you know, and I'm, I'm curious, you know, I, I was, uh, working in alt-weeklies at the time. And so was Josh. And I have to assume that, you know, sort of like alt-weeklies, I mean, Forbes digital tool, as it was called at the time was kind of an underdog.

[00:04:36] And, you know, and I wonder, you know, 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 staid and kind of established. Did you feel like the underdog? Um, and, 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 the underdog at Forbes. The dot-com wasn't even in the same building as the magazine. Oh, wow.

[00:05:04] And I actually, they wouldn't let me, they wouldn't let me in the magazine building, uh, 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 dot-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

[00:05:32] 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 and our traffic was tiny. And this is 1997. Yeah. 1998. Right. The traffic was tiny. Realize that when Bill Clinton took the oath of office in 1991, there were less than a

[00:06:02] hundred websites in the world. Right. And so that's it grew exponentially, but it had a lot of growing to do. So the dot-com was a fraction of the size of the print world at the time. And the New Republic was a really famous publication. I never read it at the time, but I'd heard it was important. And we were Forbes.com. So that's kind of the upstart. Yeah, it's funny. I subscribed to Wired and I subscribed to the New Republic.

[00:06:30] 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 intimidated by that? Okay. I think everybody was afraid of getting it wrong.

[00:06:57] I mean, it wasn't so much that we were intimidated by the story, right? It was, 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. I'm covering hackers. So hackers was your beat. Who the hell was doing that? Yeah, I was covering hackers, cybercrime, in addition to all my e-commerce duties.

[00:07:22] But the real fun stuff was the, you know, the new internet subcultures popping up. Did you watch the Angela Jolie movie? Sneakers? Was it? No, it's called Hackers. Oh, you know what? I never saw it. I will say next to Shattered Glass, a glass. I'm shaking my head. Really? I will check it out. No, I never saw it. So, you 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

[00:07:52] 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, 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.

[00:08:22] And so I was truly flummoxed. But I will say that the moment that I took the name of the company and put it into the Yahoo search engine, 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.

[00:08:50] 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 that was your first move, right? Your first move was popping juked into what did you say? AOL. Yahoo. Yahoo.

[00:09:19] That was your first move. So right off the bat, this story was suspicious to you. Yeah, it was very suspicious. Well, OK. The other thing that was suspicious to me was I read the story after my editor, you know, having written it myself. I didn't recognize anything in the story. Like, you know, the fact that, OK, the story was really crazy. All right.

[00:09:43] 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. No, I don't know. It's something like this crazy stuff. And he had an agent, a former NBA agent, right, was his representative. Hackers have agents.

[00:10:13] And 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, is 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.

[00:10:38] 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. 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 dominant. And that's a domino cascade of facts that just don't check out at all.

[00:11:06] 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. 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.

[00:11:31] I had never, ever had a piece of journalism not check out like even there were no commas or periods or semicolos that were actually you could trust in the story. It seemed 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.

[00:11:58] 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? Well, undoubtedly, he was trying to play us. That was that was there was no doubt of that.

[00:12:24] 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.

[00:12:52] 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.

[00:13:22] 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.

[00:13:51] It was it was as if a piece had never been edited or fact checked. 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.

[00:14:19] He sent fake emails, set up fake voicemail. This is during the interview. This is before the interview, I guess, and right after. So and we have to check all that. So the business card comes in. I got it. Well, it looks fake because it looks like it's and it looks like Kinko's. 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.

[00:14:48] In that scene, Stephen is, you know, Hayden Christensen playing Stephen 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 it was his demeanor that bumbling or like what was his demeanor like during that conversation? Well, it was really incredibly calm at first, which I was surprised, you know, but he seemed kind of calm about it.

[00:15:17] 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.

[00:15:40] 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.

[00:16:10] So it had a profound impact. So I feel like that that he really captured that essence in the film.