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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)."
...is how I read the headline...how appropriate
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
It really is nice to see that someone has journalistic integrity in this day and age. Rather than ignoring their mistake or trying to hush it up, they're saying they messed up, this is what they did wrong, and this is how it happened.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
...as opposed to what we see in the media every day...(?)
This kind of story, where they can go seriously meta about how they fact-check their stories and how they were misled, set to mournful music, is an almost perfect This American Life setup. They will probably want to goof like this every year now. OK, I'm being very snarky, but Ira Glass is just way too sincere for my taste.
There is a large difference between This American Life (a news program, i.e. it presents factual information) and Top Gear (a comedy program, occasionally involving cars, which presents absolutely anything for a laugh). Here's a hint: One of the two killed one of the presenters by drowning at sea.
Neither one is a "reality" show - which are, as you say, not factual.
Ira Glass is a man of honour. Would we EVER see another news agency do this?
Slashdot has been lacking in fact checking
What are you talking about? Slashdot is one huge hive of fact checkers - we get Karma if we can debunk the original post ffs!
China bashing is all in vogue these days, since they are supposed to be the next superpower, which doesn't bode well with the current superpower that is the U.S. But realistically, neither side is pure evil, or for that matter, completely innocent. The Chinese are people like you and me, capable of things both good and bad.
Moral of the story: when deciphering all the spin in the media, truth is always somewhere in the middle.
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The page about the retracted episode on the site is not linking to the audio of the show like they do for every other episode.
However, the well-documented trick still works, so if you want to listen to it you can do so here.
I think the URL is supposed to be NPR's way of letting you know they're on to you.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/02/tesla-vs-top-gear/
You know, Foxconn does some shitty things with their employees. But it's stuff like this that takes all the legitimate complaints and paints it over with, "See, it's all a lie." I hope Mike Daisey gets a horrible rash on his balls for this snow job.
I8-D
"...workers who were poisoned on an iPhone assembly line by a chemical called n-hexane. Apple's audits of its suppliers show that an incident like this occurred in a factory in China, but the factory wasn’t located in Shenzhen, where Daisey visited. Apple's audits of its suppliers show that an incident like this occurred in a factory in China, but the factory wasn’t located in Shenzhen, where Daisey visited."
So the event happened - workers poisoned by n-hexane - he just didn't visit that factor and that's the big lie? Seriously.
Read the series of New York Times articles or are those fabricated too.
Yeah kill the messenger....
Oddly enough I never heard of the original story or any of the fabricated details, yet news that it was a fake is all over the web. Apple fans too eager to believe that it may all be a hoax?
Yes, Apple fans, including the 206 hedge funds (and various other institutions, including even governments of some countries now) that own Apple stock. Considering that Apple now is bigger than the entire US retail sector, it can not be allowed to lose. Or at least not yet.
More like he admitted he took quite a bit of license in his retelling of events. I may be an Apple lover, but I'm a nerd first, and facts matter in the world of nerds, regardless of who they favor.
The monologue he engages in contains the following:
...and all these people have been exposed [to N-hexane]...Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them...can't even pick up a glass.
But then to quote from another interview with him in the last few days after he was confronted with his interpreter's contrary testimony:
Rob Schmitz: Cathy says you did not talk to workers who were poisoned with hexane.
Mike Daisey: That’s correct.
RS: So you lied about that? That wasn’t what you saw?
MD: I wouldn’t express it that way.
RS: How would you express it?
MD: I would say that I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of my trip.
Ira Glass: Did you meet workers like that? Or did you just read about the issue?
MD: I met workers in, um, Hong Kong, going to Apple protests who had not been poisoned by hexane but had known people who had been, and it was a constant conversation among those workers.
IG: So you didn’t meet an actual worker who’d been poisoned by hexane.
MD: That’s correct.
Getting the facts out should be in every nerd's interest, regardless of who they favor. This guy is clearly a liar and is being slimy in all of his responses. He could've lied about any major manufacturer. I'm glad he's being discredited. Even he admits it wasn't the truth now:
My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had [my monologue] on your show as journalism. And it’s not journalism. It’s theater.
NPR (National Public Radio) doesn't have anything to do with the production or distribution of This American Life. It is produced independently by WBEZ and distributed by PRI (Public Radio International, a direct competitor to NPR)
"may be a hoax?"
There's no "may be." Dude made stuff up. He admits it. He did it because it makes great theatre!
Now... who paid.?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
YES!!!!
Word game?
Fox News: "The number of factories Daisey visited in China was listed incorrectly, for example, as well as the number of workers he spoke with"
.. that he met underage workers at Foxconn, and that a man with a mangled hand was injured at Foxconn making iPads (and that Daisey's iPad was the first one he ever saw in operation)"
Ira Glass: "Daisey admits to fabricating these characters
AccountKiller
The TAL pieces on the economy are produced by NPR's Planet Money team, which also produce their own short biweekly podcasts and occasionally write for various magazines as well.
If you liked those TAL pieces, definitely give Planet Money a shot.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Martians invading New Jersey is great theater. Pretending to be a journalist uncovering secrets of Foxconn is just lying. Orson Welles did not go for months letting people believe it was all true, but Mike Daisey did nothing to correct people when they believed his work of fiction. Maybe some of what he saw was true but now ALL of his story is subject to doubt. Truthiness is not the same as truth.
A major problem with what Daisey did is that it undermines the credibility of future investigations. If Foxconn or any other company ever got caught with abuses, they can cite Daisey's example of how people can distort the truth.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
I was suspicious of Daisey's story when I heard it on This American Life (which is not NPR, but American Public Media, btw), as I'd seen earlier coverage on Financial Times with video http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2012/03/odm-opportunity-is-in-wind_04.html The video looks pretty fair, and it was nothing like the textile factories and other really tough places to work in China. The work is boring, but people do it to save money to buy a house and then go home after a couple of years.
Gently reply
So he made up some plausable sounding stories to make his point. It's not false in spirit, but he had to present it as literal truth for people to take it seriously.
Well, Mr. Daisey apparently attempted to humanize his story, but in a twist, the human in the story is him, but it isn't a news story, it's now just a poor retelling of the "boy who cried wolf" fable...
In the attempt to humanize the (alleged) victims of this particular industrial march, he steps over the line and dehumanizes his audience as he thinks he knows what is best for them and must "hide" the truth. It is a tragedy that many people often can't see that problem before they take these kind of steps. Often they are more concerned with their own glory than their cause and in that step, they dehumanize the very folks they wish to inform.
To say that it needed to be presented as literal truth to be taken seriously is an insult to literary history and proof of lack of perspective. As a few examples, "Sybil", "Mary Barton", "Hard Times", "Alton Locke", "The Jungle", or "Grapes of Wrath". Now it seem everyone wants a pseudo-documentary like "Roger and Me", or "An inconvenient truth". Sadly the later are only a stone's throw away from "War of the Worlds"...
At the very bottom of the story on the retraction, there is a link to a sourced New York Times story, which is nearly as damning as the retracted one. This is called "burying the lede," and it is biased reporting.
Reportedly, the TAL correction also confirmed most of what Daisey claimed; he wasn't there, but the stories turn out to be true after all. The TAL broadcast will be available for download on Sunday
Here's the link to the NYT story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html
This is were the TAL correction will be available:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction
Occam's razor: Apple managed to bully a lot of Chinese nationals into towing their corporate line, force NPR to retract its story and get Daisy to say it was all just theater OR Daisy's just another self-aggrandizing little shit who's trying to surf the Apple wave to success ? Second one seems simpler to me.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
They want to sell papers. Apple stories sell papers. Liberal guilt stories sell papers. A reason to feel smug and get your daily 5 minutes of indignant outrage sells papers. This kind of story sells A LOT of papers.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
This American Life isn't a news program, in fact they specifically point this out if you go to their web page. The best way to describe TAL in a sentence is a program that presents a series of stories (I'd call them essays) around some theme for the purpose of entertaining the listener. Some of the stories are based factual information, but others are total fiction.