Friday, March 16, 2012

FIRST TIPOFF WAS THAT "JUKT MICRONICS" WAS LISTED AS A SUPPLIER: Mike Daisey is an incredibly popular monologist, whose most recent one-man show--The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs--dealt with both his love of Apple products and his visits to China to see where many Apple products are made and his claims of outrages perpetrated by Apple against its workers there. Daisey's monologue was heavily excerpted in and served as the basis for a very popular episode of This American Life earlier this year. After further fact-checking and review, TAL has issued a lengthy retraction/apology and will devote this week's entire episode to detailing the errors and explaining how they were misled. Interestingly, Daisey has issued a statement saying he "stand[s] by his work" despite admitting that he "uses a combination of fact, memoir and dramatic license" in it.

ETA: Both the audio stream and the transcript are now available, and man, even in Ira Glass' typically soothing voice, it's pretty damn brutal.

23 comments:

  1. Dan Suitor1:56 PM

    <span>This is really sad. I'm a huge fan of "This American Life", and the investigative work they've been doing the past half-decade has been some of the best in the business (especially their financial team). They seemingly did their due diligence ahead of time, personally fact-checking as much as they could and relying on other existing reports for the rest, but Mike Daisey seems to have made a concer</span><span>ted effort to deceive them. The untruths were mostly revealed when the show went public, and became their most talked-about episode in years.

    And give "TAL" credit: they're pulling the original show, cancelling events they were hosting with Daisey, and using this week's episode as an hour-long retraction/refutation of the lies in the original story. Personal journalistic opinion: they did an incredible about of cross-checking (especially given how hard it is to get information into and out of China), and when a source stakes their personal reputation to a claim, you have to trust they're not willfully lying to embellish a point.</span>

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  2. Squid3:01 PM

    A sincere apology, a full retraction, an expression of embarrassment and contrition, and a promise to do better.  Would that every media outfit showed this sort of professionalism and class when caught in a bad story.

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  3. They shouldn't pull the original show, but keep it available in the archives with suitable disclaimers.  

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  4. Roger6:23 PM

    It's worth noting that most of Daisey's lies were about personally witnessing things that are nonetheless known to have actually happened.

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  5. That's the case for one of the big two (seeing underage workers), but not for the other (man who had mangled hand from working on the production line having never seen a working/finished iPad before and seeing it as "magic device").  It's the journalists at the Times and Marketplace who really deserve the credit for the story, since it seems they actually did the reporting.

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  6. Daisey really does not come off well at all in the transcript--his argument seems to be "well, it doesn't matter if the specifics are true, because the story still reveals truth."  Pretty sure that was a fallacy we covered in introductory logic.  Watching video clips of him, he's an entertaining and talented monologist, but the problem is passing it off as "this is exactly what happened and completely true."

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  7. chuckie12:30 AM

    Pretty sure Dan Rather tried that same argument.  Didn't work out so well for him either. 

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  8. Anonymous10:10 AM

    And Wired.

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  9. Anonymous10:11 AM

    Those pregnant pauses when Glass asks Daisey questions are just painful.  At one point I checked my computer to see whether I'd accidentally closed the window.  Yow.  

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  10. Andrea10:45 AM

    So painful to listen to the hour.  I had been planning on using parts of the original program for a lesson in my social studies course.  In the past, I have used excerpts from Three Cups of Tea.  Memoir can be a powerful tool, but we begin with a discussion about how memoir is not journalism, and therefore can be flawed.

    If you went to see Daisey's stage show, are you entitled to a refund?

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  11. The husband and I saw the Steve Jobs show last year at Woolly Mammoth, in DC. Parts of it were so funny that the laughter almost hurt. But in the end, we ended up feeling like we'd been surprised by a polemic that we might have expected at a political event. We didn't doubt the truth of the facts that he offered, but felt like he'd gone over the top in his conclusion.

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  12. What it seems like may have happened here is that Daisey started with a conclusion and then cherry-picked and spun the facts to fit it.  That can be entertaining to be sure, but it's not good journalism or good argument.

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  13. Jordan1:24 PM

    I can't wait for the HBO movie "Shattered by Glass"

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  14. Heather k2:04 PM

    I've been a fan of Daisey's for long before this monologue, but even if I agree with his basic premise that theatre is not journalism and therefore does not need to have the same set of rules, the theatre Daisey created made a pact with the audience where he sits on stage at a desk and tells you a story that he implies (by the staging and the story telling) happened to him which makes a contract with his audience.  He tells a show based on facts and personal experience.  When the audience finds out that though the facts may be based in truth, the personal experience has been entirely fabricated, at that moment Daisey has broken faith with his audience.  Sure he never promised every word was true, but he created an intimate moment with his live audience that implied that it was, and because of that his integrity has been damaged.  No matter what he claims to the contrary.

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  15. Heather k2:06 PM

    Also Daisey released a transcript of his show on the internet for free to be used however you want.  Wonder what will happen to the performances slated to be done of that?

    Also how awesome would it be if a tale about lying was told using the facts that come to light as well as his transcript?

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  16. Dan Suitor4:17 PM

    In the theatrical space, I'm fine with what he did. His real moral hazard was in presenting this to a journalistic entity as fact, and testifying as such.

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  17. The area where it gets dicey is that David Sedaris, who got his start through TAL, has also (by his own admission) used exaggeration and other similar techniques in his pieces, including Santaland Diaries--TAL has always been a mixture of personal essay/memoir and journalism.  While TAL has veered more toward journalism in recent years, where's that line?

    (Also, according to Wikipedia, Timothy Olyphant originated the role of "David" in the Santaland Diaries one-man show when it was first produced.  I'm having difficulty with that.)

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  18. Dan Suitor12:35 AM

    But, to be fair, Sedaris has ALWAYS been presented as a somewhat less-than-non-fiction act. I can't think of a single one of his pieces that's been put forth as a journalistic account.

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  19. Adam C.1:58 AM

    Suitor's right.  At least since I've been listening regularly, TAL has presented Sedaris -- and Mike Birbiglia and John Hodgman, for that matter, and I'm sure others too -- as raconteur/monologuist rather than as journalist.  I think the line, such as it is, is usually pretty clear based upon the subject matter/theme for the episode, even if it's not done explicitly.

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  20. sconstant9:22 AM

    Long time listener to TAL, and love it for the storytelling, but I have to say that after they did one of their more journalistic episodes about something I know a lot about about, I was amazed at how the storytelling was still compelling and lovely even when I thought they were oversimplifying, glossing over, or making mistakes about some pretty basic factual bits.  It was kind of a shock to me then, and thus this is less of a shock to me now than it appears to be to everyone else.

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  21. Heather k11:10 AM

    Mike Daisey has also always presented himself as not a journalist.  In fact telling places he's been for interviews that he uses tools investigative journalists do not.  And I think we all know what tools he means.

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  22. Heather k11:15 AM

    Opinion column from the Chicago Tribune theatre critic addressing his (very interesting) thoughts on it:

    http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-17/entertainment/ct-oped-0318-daisey-20120316_1_monologuist-mike-daisey-public-radio

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  23. Jenn.7:12 PM

    I do think that there is a lot of truth behind Heather's point, about how he staged the play: very barebones, with him at a table. There was some theatrical aspects to the presentation, using lights, but if I recall correctly, those were largely muted for much of the China aspects of the presentation.

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