Foxconn "Glad That Mike Daisey's Lies Were Exposed"

theodp writes "Foxconn Technology Group, Apple's largest supplier and the target of allegations of poor work conditions, welcomed a retraction of a This American Life radio program episode it said was based on lies. 'I am happy that the truth prevails, I am glad that Mike Daisey's lies were exposed,' Louis Woo, a spokesman for Taipei-based Foxconn said. 'People will have the impression that Foxconn is a bad company,' Woo added, 'so I hope they will come and find out for themselves'. Foxconn also said that it has 'no plans to take legal action.'"

Comments

Re:I hope he realizes he did more harm than good

[iluvcapra]

At no time in The Jungle does Upton Sinclair write "I, Upton Sinclair, saw..." And while much of the incidentals in The Jungle are based on real things that happened, you'd be in a lot of trouble if you tried to use The Jungle as evidence to indict anybody. Upton Sinclair never accused a living person of a criminal act in The Jungle, but Daisey makes several falsifiable claims alleging real crimes by real people against real victims.
Upton Sinclair also never represented his work as an account of actual people in an actual situation, which Mr. Daisey repeatedly did to the TAL producers.

"Muckraking," such as it is, still requires that real claims come with real evidence. Modern examples like Michael Moore's or Kirby Dick's works are content to jump back and forth between factual claims, innuendos, and moral appeals, but what makes it "muckraking" is that they never affirmatively lie. They might edit out things against their agenda, they might represented a sequence of events in such a way as to maximize emotional response, they may choose their subjects in such a way that slants their presentation of the truth.

But they never tell you the sky is green, because to them such species of claims shouldn't be necessary. When Mike Daisey said the guy with the claw hand was injured making Apple products, he was telling us the sky was green. His stories in the end aren't even about China or technology manufacturing, they're just a narrative about guilt and his emotional response to globalization, and a certain sort of liberal NPR listener, highly susceptible to demonstrations of guilt, is the consumer. That's why he made it a narrative with himself witnessing things, to elicit emotions and empathy.

If he'd said "people were poisoned by hexane, making the gadgets in your pocket," it still would have accomplished muckraking and had the virtue of being true, but instead, he said "I saw a dozen 13 year olds poisoned by hexane at Foxconn making iPhones," not because he saw that, but because doing a one-man show with "Steve Jobs" in the title sells more tickets than a one-man show about Chinese labor abuses as such.