Charles Lane (journalist)

Charles "Chuck" Lane is an American journalist and editor who is a staff writer for The Washington Post. His articles and commentary have been concerned chiefly with the activities and cases of the Supreme Court of the United States and judicial system. He was the lead editor of The New Republic from 1997 to 1999-- during which time Lane oversaw the work of Stephen Glass, a staff reporter who fabricated portions or all of 27 of 41 articles he wrote for the magazine. The fraud has long been considered to be one of the worst fabrication scandals of contemporary American journalism.

Early life and education

Charles Lane earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1983. As a Knight Fellow, he earned a Master of Studies in Law from Yale in 1997.

Career

Lane is a former foreign correspondent for Newsweek and served as the magazine's Berlin bureau chief. His coverage of the former Yugoslavia was featured the book Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff. He has also appeared as a commentator on PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and NPR's The Diane Rehm Show.

From 1997 to 1999 Lane was the editor of The New Republic. In 1998 a scandal arose when fabricated reporting by Stephen Glass was discovered. After Forbes Digital disclosed the fraud, Lane fired Glass and accepted responsibility for printing Glass's articles. Although New Republic owner Marty Peretz publicly praised Lane's handling of the situation, privately he seethed, rightfully or wrongly, blaming Lane for the debacle. After the controversy faded from public view enough, Peretz fired Lane, and according to the American Prospect, "Lane got the news from a Washington Post reporter who called to inquire about his future plans."

The Glass fabrications were "the greatest scandal in the magazine’s history and marked a decade of waning influence and mounting financial losses," the New York Times would later report.

After his firing by Peretz, Lane was hired in various capacities by the Washington Post. Since 2000, Lane covered the Supreme Court for the Washington Post. He also taught a course in journalism (about fraud) at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Lane also had taught a similar course at Princeton University in the spring of 2008.

From 2003 to 2004 Lane was a Media Fellow of the Japan Society and U.S. Japan Foundation.

In 2008 Lane published The Day Freedom Died, about the Colfax massacre of 1873 in Louisiana and its political repercussions during Reconstruction, including the resulting Supreme Court case, United States v. Cruikshank.

Controversies

In 2009, in an article appearing in the Post entitled "Medical Marijuana Is An Insult to Our Intelligence," Lane belittled a woman named Angel Raich, who was a plaintiff in a Supreme Court case claiming a right to medical marijuana. Lane wrote of Raich that she "might consider a consultation for hypochondria, or perhaps marijuana dependency." The Post later had to print a correction which disclosed that Raich was "about to undergo an operation to repair her Schwannoma, which is a benign brain tumor." It was also later disclosed that, at the time of Lane's comments, Raich was about to undergo a "highly risky surgery – surgery that her doctors had originally ruled out because it is too dangerous — because her brain tumor has now become life-threatening." The Post came under further criticism, when in an attempt to cover up Lane's original comments, many of which readers of the Post and others believed to be inappropriate, editors of Lane's at the Post scrubbed Lane's remarks" from the website, so that some readers would never know that they were ever written in the first place.

In 2010, Lane was again the subject of criticism for disparaging comments he made about overweight or obese people in writing a blog post in the Post in which he attempted to discredit an Agriculture Department study which concluded that millions of Americans faced hunger or "food insecurity." In the blog post, Lane wrote: "Adults are asked if they ever lost weight due to a lack of food money -- but not how much weight, or what they weighed before. In theory, a 300-pound man who lost a pound could count as 'food insecure.'"

In 2011, Lane wrote that he hoped that Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was unable to speak as a result of having been shot in the head a few weeks earlier, would speak out against union workers in Wisconsin if she "could speak normally". Lane's statement was criticized by some as exploitative and insensitive.

Popular culture

The 1998 journalism scandal at The New Republic was portrayed in the 2003 film Shattered Glass. Lane was portrayed by actor Peter Sarsgaard.

Also in 2003, Glass himself published a "biographical novel" entitled "The Fabulist" about his career of journalistic fabrication. A fictionalized version of Chuck Lane, "Robert Underwood" was a major character in the "novel". Reviewing the book for the Washington Post, Chris Lehmann wrote: "[T]he thin insights in "The Fabulist" suggest an uglier (and ongoing) motivation behind Glass's career than the simple compulsion to lie: a thoroughgoing, unearned contempt for the numberless people he plays for suckers -- not merely editors and colleagues, but readers, journalistic subjects and the bit players who populate the novel's social background."

Lehmann went on to write:

Take Glass's depiction of Robert Underwood... Underwood is a domineering, macho control freak. Glass's idea of meting out punishment to this fictional alter ego of his former boss is to impugn his masculinity; even as his office reeks with "the hairy-chested smell of a man rising to the occasion."

External links

• Marshall Poe, "Interview with Charles Lane", New Books in History, 7 Aug 2008