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This American Life Retracts Episode On Apple Factories In China
New submitter Hartree writes "This American Life aired an episode in January about visiting Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen China that supplies Apple with iPhones and iPads. It was the most downloaded of all of its episodes. That show helped prompt Apple to release, for the first time, a list of its suppliers and allow outside audits of working conditions at its suppliers. This American Life has now retracted the episode after finding out that Mike Daisey, whose visit to the factory the show was based on, fabricated portions of the story. This included a number of minor items, but also major ones such as his saying that he personally met underage workers and those poisoned by hexane exposure. To set the record straight, this weekend's episode of This American Life will present how they were mislead into airing a flawed story (PDF)."
I disagree. This American Life is a good show. I've listened to them for years. They are clearly very left-winged journalists (most are I guess) but this show in particular does a very good job of trying to present the other side of topic. In particular I recommend the 2 pieces they did on the financial crisis and how it happened. Their conclusions are startling and some of the best work on the topic I've heard. In fact, it's probably the ONLY journalistic effort I've seen to actually explain the subject in any depth what-so-ever.
No one ever saw armed guards, for example, yet that was a prominent part of his story.
The article just says that the translator never saw any armed guards, it never says they weren't there. Again, This American Life claims they did fact check parts like this, and found that they were true. But I can't find anything else that corroborates "armed guards at the gate" without referencing Daisey so I'll concede that point.
Underage workers were also only rumors.
And if you read the article, This American Life addressed that in their original story. The found that there were, in fact, underage workers at Foxconn - but they were rare.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
As has been noted elsewhere, the program is not from NPR; it's from Chicago Public Media (and is distributed by Public Radio International).
And as a bonus, who do you think caught the "massive lie"? Surely it was one of the great conservative media outlets, looking for an opportunity to discredit the liberals? No, it was a correspondent from another public radio group, American Public Media.
No media group is perfect, but one that is willing to publicize their errors, admit to them, and publicly retract a story with major factual errors is far above a media outlet who regularly blurs the line between their opinion shows (that never live up to journalistic standards of truth and fact-checking) and their factual news shows (that often don't live up to journalistic standards either). And I'm not just poking at Fox here; there are outlets on both sides that are awful. Fox is just one of the biggest, worst offenders.
NPR gets caught publishing a massive lie by an anti-corporation hipster, and you respond by attacking Fox News?
NPR is publicly apologizing for being wrong. Fox news went to court to defend their right to lie and still call it news. So, yes, that is reasonable given their respective histories. One would have to be naive to hold NPR and Fox as equals. It's certainly not borne out by their viewers. NPR viewers were better informed than the average citizen, while Fox news viewers are significantly less informed than the average, when it came to the Iraq war and the Neocon reasons we were going there. Fox pushed us into a war we didn't need.
And not for nothing, but there's nothing wrong with being anti-corporation. Hipster, yes.
I do not see a shred of responsibility on the part of TAL. They were caught with a falsified show segment, based on lies and inadequately vetted, easily discredited, and could ONLY have retracted it and blamed eveyrone else, or forfeited their reputation in presenting anything as either fact-based or journalistic.
Wow. I hate to see what you think should happen when news stories are actual fabrications, rather than a medium through which someone managed to slip a lie that is subtle and actually quite hard to prove. Seriously, exactly how much fact checking do you expect someone to do when someone presents them with news? The amount that you imply should happen would basically make the initial news story irrelevant, because it would have been completely rebuilt from scratch during the fact checking. Fact checking is the verification of the main points of a story, along with the verification that the main actors in the story do not actively deny what is being described.
It doesn't mean that every statement gets independently vetted.
From what I can tell, the story consisted of several interviews, and one of the interviewers decided to lie during the interview. Basic checking wasn't able to conclusively prove certain statements to be lies, so they were presented as is during the broadcast. Furthermore, the parts where basic fact checking did uncover inconsistencies, the interviewee in question was challenged on it, and he persisted.
All in all, this is some pretty solid reporting. Not to mention that the retraction was done through research they conducted on their own.
Really, if you think that this is shoddy reporting worthy to be ignored on principle, you are either not reading any news whatsoever anywhere at anytime, or you have some serious blinders on.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I think the main point, that you clearly missed, is the huge double standard that appears to go around on journalistic integrity.
Dan Rather - Stepped down after a story, which was true, but had a single letter that was falsified, came to light.
TLA - publicly and loudly retracts, and does a detailed report on what was inaccurate, to set the record straight. Still gets attacked for showing more integrity than any other news outlet has.. well, done in recent history, not sure about ever.
Fox "News" - We never see any stories on Slashdot, or the major networks, about Fox retracting a story, despite the fact that they make up a ton of shit. Daily. They went to court to FIGHT for the right to fabricate, FFS. So how is it relevant? How do you think? Insightful? You're a troll, sir.
It's just as well we don't have major sites, including Slashdot, reporting on every fabrication that Fox puts out. Jesus, we'd never see anything else in our RSS feeds.
Fox news did show that news shows are not legally obligated to tell the truth http://www.foxbghsuit.com/. News team showed that Canada and other countries ban Bovine Growth Hormone. Monsanto didn't like that and pressured Fox to keep changing the story before release to the point the new story would have been a lie. Finally the news team quit and filed a whistleblower lawsuit. The whistleblower lawsuit was thrown out because Fox news was not guilty of breaking the law as the FCC has no rules requiring news to be the truth.
American "liberal": authoritarian, pro-abortion rights, some limits on guns, thinks taxes are too low. Wants corporations to fill out paperwork before spewing pollution.
American "conservative": authoritarian, anti-abortion, no limits on guns ever, can't think of a good reason to tax anybody. Doesn't want corporations to fill out paperwork, period.
For perspective, the above was filtered through an anti-authoritarian American cynic and a beer or two.
HTH.