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)."

Comments

Re:But the story is essentially true

[samkass]

It's important to note that the details that were false all involve Daisey personally witnessing events. He didn't, he just learned about them. So some of the specific examples are dramatizations, but all the basic facts of the horrendous working conditions are true. He just didn't personally talk with the effected workers.

So, yes, This American Life should clarify the story and should admit that they screwed up in claiming that a dramatization was pure fact. But they did, in fact, check out all the basic facts about the working conditions, and everything claimed is based on things that really happened.

Don't try and take this as evidence that the troubles at Foxconn were fabricated or that Apple was unfairly targeted based on fake stories. They were not.

Actually, according to the article, some were. No one ever saw armed guards, for example, yet that was a prominent part of his story. Underage workers were also only rumors. And of the facts that were true, they were not nearly so commonplace that a casual trip would find them-- he had to pull together anecdotes across space and time to make it seem like all this stuff was happening casually and consistently. It wasn't.

Re:Refreshing

[3.1415926535]

"At that point, we should've killed the story," says Ira Glass, Executive Producer and Host of This
American Life. "But other things Daisey told us about Apple's operations in China checked out, and we
saw no reason to doubt him. We didn't think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his
story. That was a mistake."

That sounds like, "We got it wrong," to me.

Re:Refreshing

[snowgirl]

Exactly. To think, that a media outlet would have the balls to admit they were wrong, then explain how they made the mistake. That is rare these days...

Well, as they note on NPR, the stories checked out, and were real events... it just turns out that Daisey didn't personally witness them.

It's like getting all worked up over a story that is based on real events, and it's like "good! but remember, it's still fictionalized..." They took a theater act and turned it into a journal piece without any augmentation to ensure that viewers understood that while these events were true, they were being dramatized.