David McElroy

In January, the public radio show This American Life devoted an entire episode to the issue of working conditions inside the Chinese factories that make Apple products. On Friday, the show was forced to retract that entire episode. It turns out the man who reported his alleged experiences in the story made it all up.

It’s a terrible journalistic embarrassment to This American Life, and the show is devoting this week’s entire episode to outlining the errors and untruths in what was broadcast. (You can hear this week’s episode here and you can read the blog post in which the show announced the retraction here.)

To me, this is a complex story with implications for journalism, culture, business, philosophy and even politics. Let’s look briefly at the facts before getting to the potential lessons.

Mike Daisey is a performer, not a journalist. He writes and performs theatrical performances that attempt to present his ideas about life’s truths. The best of theatre, film and literature does exactly this, but it’s clear when we see a play, watch a movie or read a novel that we’re experiencing fiction that’s intended to convey larger truths. We might leave the experience gaining insight, but rarely do we believe we’ve gained facts based on the stories we’ve experienced.

Daisey has admitted in the past to mixing fact and fiction. Almost six years ago, the New York Times said this about him:

He admits that he once fabricated a story because it “connected” with the audience. After telling this lie over and over again, it became so integrated into the architecture of his piece that it became impossible to remove or, perhaps, to distinguish from what really happened. Mr. Daisey seems embarrassed by this confession, but he also pursues the issue further. Is lying acceptable when in service of a greater truth? What does truth mean in the context of art?

But this story wasn’t presented on a stage as artistic truth for a theatre audience. Daisey presented himself to the public — through broadcast news shows — as telling the objective truth of what he saw. (Take a look at what he said on MSNBC.)

When I first heard that Daisey claimed to have gone to China for about a week and come back with unverifiable tales of rampant worker abuses, I was suspicious. I’ve been a reporter, so I know it’s not easy to do what he claims to have done. It’s slow and hard work to get access to places, develop sources who have confidence in you and then find the people you need to talk to. The idea of a rank amateur doing all of that in China — without even speaking the language — in the time he claimed struck me as improbable at best.

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