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Know Your Enemy

'Shattered Glass,' Journalism, & the End of History [Teaser]

Know Your Enemy

Matthew Sitman

Ronald Reagan, Conservative Movement, Politics, Right Wing, Society & Culture, National Review, Socialists, Reactionaries, News, History, William F Buckley, Conservatism, Leftists Look At Conservatism

4.72.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2026

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Matt and Sam discuss the 2003 film, Shattered Glass, about disgraced New Republic writer and fabulist Stephen Glass.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Well, Sam, one of the things that I also was interested in is the kind of politics of this era.

0:05.0

I'm always drawn to these stories where it's taking place in the 90s, right?

0:10.1

In the end of history era.

0:12.2

And I thought it's so interesting that even editorially, I mean, this is not a critical comment,

0:16.8

but one of the things Andrew Sullivan did, when Andrew became the editor, you know,

0:21.0

the New Republic became cooler, hipper in a way.

0:24.0

You know, they were publishing Camille Paglia.

0:26.5

As parents puts it in his memoir, Andrew had made us hip, really made us a part of popular

0:32.2

culture in a way we hadn't been before.

0:34.9

Young people read us and were inspired.

0:37.0

So there's something really

0:37.9

interesting about the grand ideological battle of the Cold War being over. You know, magazines,

0:44.6

this is the 90s, kind of before the internet ruined everything. And you could become famous,

0:48.9

as we were talking about Tucker Carlson, right? Being a magazine writer was a different kind of

0:53.7

form of validation and

0:56.6

prestige and status than it is now. And, you know, the grand ideological battles over Clinton's

1:02.7

president, like, what were the stakes in political writing? Making up fabulous lies like this,

1:08.3

it seems kind of fitting for the moment. Well, because it doesn't actually seem that important.

1:12.8

Yeah, in grand ideological, political terms.

1:16.0

And I think something that's interesting if you look at all the stories that Stephen Glass

1:21.1

officially made up, you see something really interesting, which is that he seems to have

1:26.1

had an instinct to do one that pricked the ideological sensibilities, the left, and one that pricked them of the right and kind of go back and forth.

...

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