Here’s a link to the “Retraction” podcast of This American Life.

It’s painful to listen to all around.

The podcast includes two interviews with Mike Daisey, and in one his facts are taken apart stitch by stitch by a reporter from public radio’s Marketplace show, a reporter who lives and works in China and who has toured the very factory Mike Daisey talked about, and who knows that the facts shared are not true. Yes, Mike Daisey lied about what he found. Evidently, he did not find children making Apple products. He did not interview as many people, or tour as many factories as he said. He wholecloth appropriated the story of a factory accident that happened 1000 miles away. He said that the factory had guards with guns, which it didn’t. He did not interview a man whose hand had been turned into “a claw” who had never before seen an iPad, even though he’d made his living assembling them. All these things, plus more, are fabrications, and Daisey cops to it. I don’t like what Mike Daisey did here, and I share Ira Glass’s outrage and barely sheathed anger at being lied to.

It’s also painful to listen to the last segment of the show — in which an actual reporter is interviewed by Ira Glass about the actual working conditions of the factories in China where Apple products are manufactured. Many of the sort of abuses that Mike Daisey made up exist in actuality. According to this report, Apple has made some course corrections — in eliminating child workers, for one — but there’s still work to be done, and I hope they mandate it quickly. They need to establish stricter standards and insist upon them.

I hope that two things come out of this sad story. One is that, ultimately, factory workers in China and elsewhere get better working conditions. The second is that we all take this as yet another reminder that lying — whether you’re Mike Daisey, or James Frey, or Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton, or Jayson Blair, or Janet Cooke — is wrong.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2012 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Playwriting, Politics, Theatre, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.