New Republic Purges Archives

by Allan R. Andrews

Not only has The New Republic apologized for the fabrications of one of its reporters, the magazine has now apologized to its online readers and is purging its online archives of the stories written by the offending writer, Stephen Glass.

Recall that Glass recently was fired from his job as an associate editor with the magazine after it was discovered he had manufactured characters and events in several of his feature stories for the publication. Most notably, he wrote of a young computer "hacker" who had broken into a company's system. Both the hacker and the company, it turns out, were figments of Glass's imagination.

Glass went to great lengths to sustain the fabrication, creating a false host web site for the fictional company and providing real addresses for places where alleged meetings with his hacker sources took place. When challenged, Glass first tried to defend his work and then confessed to the elaborate hoax.

While I harbor nothing less than disdain for Glass's deceptions, I'm bothered equally by the New Republic's effort to alter its history. This strikes me as a baby step in the direction of Orwellian Newspeak or the rewriting of history so often associated with despotic rulers and regimes. It is far from the image of a journal that historically has defended the ideals of justice and mercy.

For a magazine that often prides itself in its liberal interpretation of justice, the attempt to purge its electronic memory bank of Stephen Glass's deceptive writings contradicts its traditional stance.

Is the magazine now changing its dress to provide for the alteration of history?

New Republic editors might argue the online archive is not the print archive and purging it doesn't matter that much. I resent such a stance, not only because of its implied insult to online journalism and research, but because it still smacks of tampering with a historical record.

I doubt any of NR's editors would consent to such tampering with other's historical documents. After all, where would it stop?

Suppose one suggested a purge of the archives of the New Republic to make it appear the United States won the struggle in Vietnam? How about mitigating the horror of the Holocaust? Why not rewrite the history of America to vindicate the harsh conquerors of the Natives of the land?

Our goal as journalists and as historians is truth, and truth is not served by our altering the documents of history.

What is it the editors of the New Republic fear in the record of their failure to guard the gate of their copy desk?

Let them insert editor's notes. Let them place a dagger beside the name of Stephen Glass in every article he manufactured. But do not excise the electronic record.

In my estimation, the wiser editorial course would be to let the record of the magazine having been duped by a dissimulator stand as a monument to a resolve that such fraud will not occur again in its pages while these editors are guarding the gates.