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"This American Life" and NYT retract Apple Story
Topic Started: Mar 17 2012, 05:29 AM (211 Views)
George K
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Finally
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory

Ira Glass writes:
Quote:
 
I have difficult news. We've learned that Mike Daisey's story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We're retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey's acclaimed one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week's episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory."

Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn't excuse the fact that we never should've put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.

We're horrified to have let something like this onto public radio. Many dedicated reporters and editors - our friends and colleagues - have worked for years to build the reputation for accuracy and integrity that the journalism on public radio enjoys. It's trusted by so many people for good reason. Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards.

And the New York Times: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/this-american-life-retracts-episode-on-apples-suppliers-in-china/?hp
Quote:
 
Some of Mr. Daisey’s stories about Foxconn were also included in an online-only Op-Ed article that he wrote for The New York Times last October. He wrote, “I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, ‘It’s a kind of magic.’ ”

According to Mr. Schmitz, the translator said that did not happen. On Friday afternoon, The Times added an editors’ note to the Op-Ed article that reads: “Questions have been raised about the truth of a paragraph in the original version of this article that purported to talk about conditions at Apple’s factory in China. That paragraph has been removed from this version of the article.”
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
Makes one wonder who would want his story to be untrue. Certainly whoever provided the interpreter.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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Red Rice
HOLY CARP!!!
"This American Life" screwed up, but good for it for promptly and fully retracting, and good for "Marketplace" and Rob Schmitz for following up and exposing the truth. It's a shame the media doesn't always do such a fine job of self-correcting. The original show with Daisey's monologue was very compelling, but listening to the retraction episode yesterday revealed how unscrupulous and deceitful Daisey was.
Civilisation, I vaguely realized then - and subsequent observation has confirmed the view - could not progress that way. It must have a greater guiding principle to survive. To treat it as a carcase off which each man tears as much as he can for himself, is to stand convicted a brute, fit for nothing better than a jungle existence, which is a death-struggle, leading nowhither. I did not believe that was the human destiny, for Man individually was sane and reasonable, only collectively a fool.

I hope the gunner of that Hun two-seater shot him clean, bullet to heart, and that his plane, on fire, fell like a meteor through the sky he loved. Since he had to end, I hope he ended so. But, oh, the waste! The loss!

- Cecil Lewis
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
I was listening to this on the radio yesterday. What strikes me is the immediacy with which they both assumed Daisey was truthful and now how quickly they have turned on him. There are a lot of powerful people and entities who have a vested interest in discrediting his story.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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George K
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Finally
Here are some of his "misrepresentations."
Daisey claimed that the Foxconn guards at the gates had guns. Schmitz said that, in all of his years of reporting, he had never seen guards with guns. “The only people allowed to have guns in China are the military and the police, not factory guards.” This was corroborated by Cathy Lee, who told This American Life that she had never seen a gun in person.

Daisey claimed that he met with workers “at coffeehouses and different Starbucks in Guangzhou.” Schmitz pointed out that it was unlikely that factory workers who made fifteen to twenty dollars a day would sip coffee at Starbucks. Because Starbucks is pricier in China than in the United States.

Daisey claimed that he talked to hundreds of workers. Cathy Lee said that it was 50 workers on the outside.

Daisey claimed that he posed as a businessman to get inside Foxconn’s factories. In fact, Daisey’s appointments were all set up in advance.

Daisey claimed that he visited ten factories Cathy Lee told This American Life it was only three.

While Apple’s own audits have revealed some underage workers (a total of 91 workers among hundreds of thousands in 2010), Cathy Lee revealed that Daisey had not met any underage workers during his trip. “Maybe we met a girl who looked like she was thirteen years old, like that one. She looks really young,” said Cathy Lee. “I think if she said she was thirteen or twelve, then I would be surprised. I would be very surprised. And I would remember for sure. But there is no such thing.” In the ten years that Cathy Lee has visited factories in Shenzhen, she’s hardly seen any underage workers.

Daisey claimed to meet twenty-five to thirty workers from an unauthorized union in an all-day meeting. The meeting did happen. But it was two to three workers, and the meeting was only for a few hours, over lunch at a restaurant.

Cathy Lee has doubts about the government-issued blacklist of people who the companies weren’t allowed to hire. While she remembers the blacklist, she says that it didn’t have an official government stamp, which any government-issued document would have.

Daisey claimed that he encountered people who had been poisoned by n-hexane, with their hands shaking uncontrollably. But Cathy Lee told Rob Schmitz that she and Daisey hadn’t met anybody poisoned by hexane. The story came from news in 2010, but the hexane poisoning occurred in a Wintek family in Suzhou, nearly a thousand miles away from Shenzhen.

Daisey describes an old man who got his hand twisted in a metal press and who has never seen an iPad turned on. In Daisey’s monologue, the old man says, “It’s a kind of magic,” when the iPad’s screen is turned on. Cathy Lee said that this never happened. “It’s just like a movie scenery,” she said on the program. She did say she remembered the guy, but that he never worked at Foxconn.
The taxi ride on the exit ramp that ended in thin air 85 feet from the ground? Cathy Lee said that it did not happen.

Cathy Lee said that she and Daisey never saw any factory dorm rooms.

Daisey claimed that it would not work if he talked with Foxcon workers at the gate. But Cathy Lee has been taking workers to the factory gates for years.

...

Daisey told The New York Times in 2006 that he “once fabricated a story because it ‘connected’ with the audience.” That same year, Daisey performed a one-man show called Truth: The Heart is a Million Little Pieces Above All Things, which used James Frey and JT Leroy as inspiration. As Variety wrote at the time, “Daisey comes to a judgment that is strict but sympathetic; he suggests that if people are often the least reliable narrators of their own lives, they are also sometimes the most engaging.”

When I contacted theater companies on Friday afternoon, it was evident that they were more taken with the “engaging” nature of Daisey’s show rather than its veracity. DJ from New York’s The Public Theater informed me that the three remaining performances of Daisey’s show scheduled on Saturday and Sunday were still on. There were no plans to cancel.

But what of theatergoers who might have believed that Daisey’s story is real and who booked tickets in advance of these allegations?

“We don’t offer refunds,” said DJ.

Burlington’s Flynn Center will not be canceling Daisey’s March 31st show. The spokesperson and I have been playing telephone tag.

When I contacted Emily Weiner at the D-Crit Conference, where Daisey is scheduled to speak on May 2nd, I was apparently the first person to inform Ms. Weiner of the news. There was nobody available to issue an official statement.

I was also the first to inform a very friendly woman at the Emmett Robinson Theater of Daisey’s fabrications. I left a message with Jesse Bagley, the chief contact person at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, where Daisey is scheduled to perform from May 31st to June 6th.

The best response I was able to get was from Brooke Miller, Press and Digital Content Manager and designated spokesperson for the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company. Daisey is scheduled to perform at the Washington, DC theater from June 17th to August 5th. After getting Miller on the phone, I was told that there would be no refunds or cancellations. When I pressed Miller further on what circumstances might cause the theater to issue refunds or cancel, I was simply told that the show was “constantly changing.”

Woolly Mammoth even expressed pride in Daisey’s work. In an official statement sent to me via email, Miller called The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs “a daring work of theatre that opened people’s eyes to some of the real working conditions in Chinese factories where high-tech products are manufactured–conditions which have been documented by subsequent journalistic accounts in The New York Times and other sources. It’s a core value of Woolly to present works that spark conversation around topics of socio-political importance, and we’re pleased to have played a part in bringing these issues to national attention. We look forward to welcoming Mike back for an encore performance of the show this summer.”
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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kenny
HOLY CARP!!!
TAL is a trippy show.
Sometimes it's superb.
Other times it's really stupid.

The way they insert music into the storytelling was really effective till I got sick of it.
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Horace
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HOLY CARP!!!
kenny
Mar 17 2012, 09:13 AM
TAL is a trippy show.
Sometimes it's superb.
Other times it's really stupid.

The way they insert music into the storytelling was really effective till I got sick of it.
I feel the same about the music. But it's a formula that's been copied now, by the Freakonomics podcast, probably among others.
As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good?
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ivorythumper
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
Sounds like a lot of he said - she said.

"In the ten years that Cathy Lee has visited factories in Shenzhen, she’s hardly seen any underage workers." Can't speak to Shenzhen, but I saw a whole lot of apparently very young workers in factories throughout China. Startlingly so.
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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jon-nyc
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Cheers
Psst - IT.... Not those kinds of "factories".
In my defense, I was left unsupervised.
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