Utterly amazing Mike Daisey rollback about Apple on This American Life.

[nolabear]

In an era of "I'm sorry if you were offended", Ira Glass is doing an hour long deconstruction of Mike Daisey's fabrications about the Chinese Apple factory. They take full responsibility, talk to Daisey at length (he sounds dazed and caught and really low spirited) and do it with what's clearly a sense of abject contrition.

Imo Daisey did what writers and journalists are often in danger of doing, conflating fact and fiction and calling it fact. Rick Bragg, a writer whose work I love, did the same thing and lost his NYT job. Daisey's career is going to suffer terribly as it should. He'll have to earn trust back and may never do so. He sounds like he tried desperately to maintain the lie and he failed. It's a mess.

I bring all this up because it's a brilliant study in doing something wrong (on This American Life's part), and rather than doing the defensive "well THEY do it too!" routine that is all too common in media now, eating a huge quantity of crow humbly and with a desire to make things right.

And it makes for damned compelling radio. Hope you all get a chance to listen.

[madrchsod]

1. so there is nothing wrong with apple`s suppliers?

or did this guy just phone in his story based on actual facts?

[Old and In the Way]

2. The fact that our side takes their reporting seriously is encouraging.

And willing to face up to it head-on. I wish Fox News would attempt this...but they'd probably spend as much time correcting themselves as they would reporting the "facts".

Not sure why Daisey - being an entertainer who would use dramatic license to create his show - would be a good reporting source for TAL. Daisey should have been forthright and not made up sources w/o letting Glass know he was doing this, though.

[frazzled]

3. It was fascinating, but I have to say

I felt Glass's apologia was just a little self-serving and self-exonerating in the end. A day late and a dollar short as well (their feature catapulted this guy to fame and appearance on dozens of radio and television shows). Although admitting they never should have aired it, he does nothing to explain why on earth they would have done so in the first place. He never admits what must have been the case: "We wanted to believe and so we didn't do the normal due diligence." The Marketplace reporter seems to have spotted the fakes from the very beginning, and listening to Daisey in retrospect makes me think you'd have to be a truly naive fool to have bought the whole story.

I love This American Life and have listened to it almost every week for years. But I now have this big hole in my heart: I don't think I'll ever buy a story as being wholly "true" on there ever again. I've always known it was "artistic" documentary, but I did believe in the documentary part. They're going to have to work just as hard as Daisey to get their credibility back.

[Pholus]

4. Consider that the Daisey's "fabrications" were his first hand involvement, not the events themselves

The main allegations in the NYTIMES and by ABC were NOT discredited by this. The NPR reporter who found the show troubling didn't dispute what happened (other than ARMED guards), just that Daisey could have seen all of it only in six days.

It's good the "This American Life" cleared the air to maintain its deservedly high standards, but do NOT confuse that with the first rate journalism by professionals that brought these problems to light.

That work still stands.