Having Good Comps

I think I liked Shattered Glass a lot more than Atrios did, and so perhaps I’m interpreting it more charitably, but I’m not sure that the film portrays Lane as a hero so much as it shows someone a bit in over is head and slow on the uptake finally doing the right thing. He looks good only because his predecessor was Michael Kelly, who was (partly, one suspects, precisely because of his indifference to truth) very popular among the staff. I like the fact that the movie makes a lot of this implicit — showing how much his writers adored him while leaving for you to figure out that his ineptitude allowed Glass to get away with it for a ridiculously long time — but if you think back on it Lane is sympathetic only to the extent that he dealt with a bad situation with a minimal amount of competence. But he was never the driving force behind exposing a story that (unlike some of Glass’s previous fabrications) was always rather transparently fabricated.