Journalism is a serious business, according to Shattered Glass. Directed by Billy Ray, the film is a biopic of Stephen Glass (played by Hayden Christensen), an associate editor of The New Republic until 1998, when he was found to be fabricating stories. The film operates at four levels. One level consists of a few voiceovers, in which Glass tries to present his own point of view. The second level is a lecture about magazine journalism that he presents to a high school journalism class at his alma mater, Highland Park High School, a Detroit suburb. The third level is a chronology of Glass's tenure on The New Republic. The fourth level consists of titles at the end of the film that update filmviewers on the current status of some of the major figures in the film. The most informative part of the film is a description, step by step, of how an idea for a story moves through a process of fact checking, writing, rewriting, scrutiny by a lawyer, as well as a presentation to a staff meeting, where the median age of fifteen writers is twenty-six; Glass is booted out at age twenty-four. In addition, filmviewers see that there are several hierarchical levels--an apprentice writer, an associate editor, the senior editor, and the publisher Martin Peretz. (The latter, played by Ted Kotcheff, is portrayed as more interested in commas than in content.) How was Glass able to pull the wool over the eyes of so many over a period of two or more years? The answer is that Glass ingratiated himself into the good graces of everyone in the staff and mesmerized everyone at staff meetings by dramatizing phony stories that relied on facts which could not be rechecked because they were backed up by manufactured interview notes. The first article that arouses suspicion occurs in 1997, when Glass claims that delegates were getting plastered during a convention of conservative Republicans, drinking from small bottles of alcohol found in the minibar of a hotel suite, whereas the hotel has no minibars. Glass slides out of the false story by saying that he saw the kinds of small bottles found in minibars, so the occupants of the suite must have rented the small refrigerator from the hotel. The senior editor, Mike Kelly (played by Hank Azaria), verifies that the hotel does indeed rent small refrigerators, but he cannot recheck any other fact, so Glass is off the hook. In 1998, however, his fabrications about a supposed convention of computer hackers are spotted by Adam Penenberg (played by Steve Zahn) by the Forbes online news service.