Fabricated claims about Apple's manufacturing prompt retraction from 'This American Life' [u] - Page 2

Exactly. When you report on national airwaves things as "facts" - it's generally considered by most children, to understand whether your "facts" are correct or not. Perhaps a couple million will teach this person, what common sense, his station manager and his parents failed. Before you open your mouth to condemn a company publically - it's usually best to have some facts to back you up. Sorry, made up "facts" don't count.

Meanwhile thousands of uninformed people around the world take his story (and the rest of the tech press) as fact and now despise Apple and picket their shops. A whole bunch of whipped up middle class frenzy for nothing.

What a croc. It seems that the shrillest, vitriolic idiots get the most attention these days and have no consequences to face. How depressing.

I appreciate your point but I tend to disagree.

It was a show. At a theatre, with a stage and dramatic lighting and everything.

Anyone going to that and expecting factual reporting needs to have their head examined. He could have been more forthcoming about the fact that the story was confabulated from various sources and dramatised to the extent that it was, but I would argue the audience should have expected that and that somewhere (no doubt in tiny tiny print), he probably *did* tell the audience that. Legally however, his ass is covered simply by the fact that it was a show held in a theatre, regardless of disclaimers.

I don't necessarily know all the facts though so I'm just going to say that IMO the "tech media" is as much to blame or more so than Daisey. I still think the mistake here was in presenting this show as some kind of fact and that it was the media that took on that particular task.

Here we have a guy that is still trying to pass his garbage off as the truth. Rush on the other hand at least admits to telling of tall tales to make a point.

This.

If he knew they were fact checking and purposely lied, trying to say "it was theatrical, not journalistic" sounds more than a bit hollow.

I doubt that this American Life calls itself a "news outlet"---a link would be nice here. Sometimes they have "news" but they're definitely set up as an entertainment outlet. Unless David Sedaris, a regular contributor, is considered a journalist...

Definitely should have given this one a closer look before airing it as truth rather than just a good story though.

Frankly it is in large part due to the pressure to be politically correct. In the good old days if someone offended you, you called them out for a duel. One way or another the issue was ended. Nowadays some have this mentality that every crackpot and nutcase has a valid point of view. That is an extremely sad development in our culture.

^ Taking ownership. That's something, at least. I appreciate when people admit they were wrong, particularly when it effects others.


^ Not taking ownership. I understand he is an entertainer... but flat out lies presented as facts are wrong no matter what your intent, particularly when they are in regard to such serious topics.

I'm working on a first draft of a new stage play, and I'd like your opinions, fellow AppleInsiders!
Here are two of its most dramatic moments:

Act 1 Scene 1

(Steve Ballmer's Office, Microsoft Headquarters)

BALLMER: Nice disguise, Daisy. You make a terrible woman.

DAISEY: This isn't a disguise. I really am a transvestite.

BALLMER: Wow, really? Me too. I secretly wish people would call me "Monkey Girl."

DAISEY: Your wish is my command, Monkey Girl.
Speaking of which, here's the Apple play you paid for.
[Slaps a heavy manuscript onto Ballmer's desk.]
Read it and let me know if it's got enough slander in it.

[...]

Act 2 Scene 1

(Split set - BALLMER in a Seattle Starbucks, DAISEY seated on a toilet at a NYC transvestite bar)

BALLMER: [Shrieking into a KIN 1] DAISEY. You moron! You talked to Ira Glass?

DAISEY: [Flinching, then talking into a white iPhone 4S] Yes. Yes I did. And I almost had him.

BALLMER: Almost? You *almost* had him? We're paying you good money, Mister Drama Queen.
You were our only hope against Apple! Dammit!

(People in the Starbucks stop what they're doing, swivel their heads to hear Ballmer better.)

BALLMER: Listen up, Girly Man. No more funding for you. We're not going to buy all the tickets for your show any more.
No more fake audiences, girlfriend!

(People in the Starbucks stealthily bring out their smartphones and start shooting video of Ballmer. They're all using iPhones.)

BALLMER: What are you idiots looking at? DAMMIT!

[...]


That's just a taste for the overall concept. Of course, I have no idea if Mr. Daisey is, in fact, a transvestite. Or whether or not Microsoft paid Mr. Daisey to write his play. Or whether or not Steve Ballmer is also a transvestite.

But hey, artistic license, right?

like msnbc, most of its programming is commentary that can be entertaining.

Perhaps then he should not have left the stage and gone on so many tv news broadcasts. For example, his interview on Lateline is just one piece of evidence that I personally watched where he represented himself as a journalist.


And he has misrepresented himself many times over. http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...04l304l3-1l1l0

It doesn't matter if it was billed as a news outlet or dramatic theatre. While the latter gets a little more leeway, you can't make flat-out lies and get away with it even in theatre. It's not easy to win a suit, but it can be done. The closest relevant cases I could find in just a few seconds of searching involved movie and theatre production reviews. The relevant standard is that if the review is fair and objective, then one can't win a slander suit. OTOH, if the review is so blatantly biased and factually incorrect, there are grounds for a slander suit.

I suspect that the same thing applies here.

Not that it matters - I can't see Apple going after him. It will simply feed the frenzy and we'll see headlines like "Apple goes after its critics over China slave labor issues".

First I saw this Headline here:

NPR show pulls Foxconn story, says 'partially fabricated' | Electronista http://j.mp/FOlmZW

But I usually rely on Apple Insider that covered it

Fabricated claims about Apple's manufacturing prompt retraction from 'This American Life' http://j.mp/ABNJU8


I don't know if it is too soon to call this Mike Daisey performer a well meaning, or not, a scam artist or not He is definitely a gifted performer, cause it's not a common skill to memorize so much text. He definitely knows how to talk, which is impressive, but All his performing gifts are not a guarantee of him being a flawless human, with possible issues of his own, as well as agendas!

Non of us can read minds or hearts But it is quite possible that Mr. Daisy's need for attention, and a desire to promote himself and his theater piece, which is a product -- all that might have taken a priority over fairness!

I don't want to hit below the belt , or to start analyzing Mr. Daisy! He could be just another guy with a weight problem, trying to "save the world", and I'll bite my tongue!!!

Again, I don't know what's in Mr. Daisy's heart, i.e. what his Real Agenda is! However, it's safe to assume that his Heart would prefer to carry less weight!!! So maybe he could focus his passions on that a bit more, rather than to take his life's frustrations on Apple, as a way of selling more tickets to his show?! But again, I don't want to hit below the belt, because being fat is not a crime, and none of us are perfect! It's just that I SMELL SOMETHING here! Maybe it's something that Mr. Daisy is hiding from us, and maybe even from himself?

I never heard of him until he got some Attention because of his Themes being related to Apple OK, so maybe he tried to "catch a ride" on Apple's Coat Tales, but If some Good Solid Investigation proves Mr. Daisy to be a Shameless Self-Promoter, then it those who believed him and in his cause that are "being taken for a ride", taken advantage of. Yes, people can be taken advantage of if they are led to believe that the Cause is Great!!!

I've read a lot excellent Comments here on this Foxconn Issue and Apple! I see lots of politics involved here, that are not limited to media alone!

I agree with those who say that the fault is with Chinese Government, not Apple!!! Chinese PEOPLE Republic is supposed to be about People, about Workers' Paradise, ala the Former USSR! But, instead, they are PIMPING their PEOPLE, and then the Foreign Capitalists are expected to lead the Revolution to attain that very Workers' Paradise? How STUPID!

Today, TGIF, 3/16/12, as the Newest iPad (3) went on sale in the US, we have a bunch of Truth Seekers, Defenders of the Poor Chinese People, demonstrating in front of Apple Stores, seeking more Clicks of Attention for themselves, and whatever other Agendas they have! They single out Apple, to the Exclusion of other Tech Giants, whose products are also being manufactured by Foxconns of the world! At the same time, the Chinese are Killing Each Other for their iPhones, and there is a strong competition to even get a job at Foxconn!!!

I applaud NPR for their Retraction, and I call on All Media to Highlight that Fact and show more FAIRNESS in this situation, where it's fashionable to beat up on Apple!!!

I Applaud Apple's Efforts to shed the Light Of Truth on this situation!

Apple Alone should NOT be required to LIBERATE The Chinese, nor to Bring the Jobs Back to the USA!

ALL Apple Competitors should be held to the same standard!

Badmouthing Apple to do their Competitors' Dirty Work is a DIRTY POLITICS which have to STOP!

Manipulation Public Opinion with Half Truth, Drive By Reporting, in the name of Liberating Chinese Workers, is A LOW LIFE THING TO DO!!!

Let them REALLY Investigate the Mr. Dasiy and some others, including the Media Itself on what the TRUTH is in this case!!!! And, once they run out of topic, there is always US Health Care and other Countless Topics to really Sink Teeth Into!!!

The World has already voted for Apple with its $$$, buying their Products and AAPL!!! The JEALOUSY of Apple and it's BILLIONS of $$$ won't Liberate Chinese Workers or anyone of us.

I am no Apple Fan Boy! I've seen Apple's Shortcomings, but overall, it's hard not to admire Apple!!!

Mike Daisey and Rush Limbaugh are beacons of rational intelligent thinking and integrity. Anybody who question their honourable intent in the context of interrogative American journalism at its finest is nothing but a atheist communist sonofabitch who should be tarred an d feathered.
Theatrically speaking, of course

gee all he did was yell fire in the a theater and caused panic in China, how can he be responsible for that.

Agreed. Too bad the New York Times doesn't have the same integrity.

Thompson

I say give them another chance. This American Life has a long history of awesome shows.
This retraction of the whole show is maybe bigger news than the original podcast. I hadnt looked into Daiseys show much but read articles here and there. Now Ira Glass is saying very publicly that Daisey lied to him and his staff. That gives a better insight into the nature of this Mike Daisey guy and his show.

Me too, but note that Foxconn workers started getting pay raises a couple of years ago, and this guy had nothing to do with it. Also note that Apple began their audits and trying to help the situation years ago, long before the New York Times pretended to scoop the story.

The bottom line for me is that although they want to claim credit for bringing this issue more into focus and help the workers, both Daisey and the New York Times have done far less for the issue than Apple themselves did when they began listing their suppliers and making their audit information publicly available on their website.

Thompson

I'll repost what I said on "The Verge" regarding his "Theatrical" excuse...and then append to it.

"That’d be fine and dandy if he used a made up company representing “Big Tech” and a made up factory representing “Big Manufacturer” because right now this shit seems like it was a “Big Lie” and thankfully the truth is out though the die-hard bashers will ignore it…"

I too hope he gets punished to the full extent of the law because as someone else said he did much more harm to any true workers rights cases out there as now they'll all be looked at suspiciously.

Hopefully he also helps set a precedent that requires anyone who delivers something as news at least attempt to be factual.

Since "This American Life" is making the apology at least as visible as the mistake, then I think they have vindicated themselves. That is the way things must be. Many journalists try to spin it into a non-mistake. (Remember Dan Rather's sudden unrepentant flameout?)

Thompson

But this isn't mainly about Daisey's "show". It is about a production of "This American Life". According to this information, Daisey misled the producers of the show into believing specific "facts" and then tried to prevent them from checking up on them by providing a false name. That's enough for me. (Not that I'm giving the producers a free pass, but at least they showed integrity by retracting the mistake as visibly as they did the mistake itself.)

Thompson

Here's the Daring Fireball take:
But the thing is, Daiseys supposed stories always set off my spidey sense one guy claiming things that no one else was claiming or reporting, all uncovered during a single six-day trip to China by a man who doesnt speak Chinese and with no prior investigative reporting experience. Ends up my spidey sense was right: Daisey made it up. --John Gruber--

Have you ever listened to Ira Glass? I would not call him a journalist or a sober minded professional. He is an entertainer pretending to be a journalist, he got caught going beyond the pale this time. It won't be the last time he attempts to go beyond, his show is based on it.

So the program is actually titled "This American Lie"?

From listening to his interview with Terri Gross on Fresh Air over NPR, author and NYTimes reporter Charles Duhigg really strikes me as another fabulist. His so called reporting is full of straw men, NEVER does he credit any of his supposed sources, he relies on anecdotes alone. Per wit, he claims to have lost twelve pounds in three months just by skipping one cookie a day; he claims that an executive from Target had to apologize to the father of a pregnant teen for having sent her advertising material relating to her condition, without naming the parties involved; he claims to have spoken to a fair labor representative who couldn't tell him her name but told him that Foxconn hid underage workers prior to inspection. The B.S. was so thick I could smell it right over the interwebs. Charles Duhigg is today's Judith Miller, the NYTimes should be ashamed to have anything to do with him. Wonder when they'll get around to retracting his Apple stories.

I saw Daisy perform "The Last Cargo Cult" at Wooley Mammoth Theater in Washington, DC. He had a gimmick where the ushers passed out American dollars of different denominations. I got a 20, my wife a five. I found the performance interesting for the most part, but extremely self-aggrandizing. At the end, he tied in a moral about the money, and then begged for it back. I didn't find his rational convincing. However, since he was so concerned about the tribe in question, and so passionate about their plight, I tried to talk to him about it. Turns out, he never did any follow-up, and had no idea how the islanders fared at present, nor did he seem to care. It was a major turn off. So much so that when Wooley Mammoth brought him back with "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," I decided not to renew our subscription for that season.

When I really go upset was when Bill Mahr, of HBO's Real Time, was exalting Daisy at the top of the show for his hard-hitting exposé of Apple's Foxconn assembly practices. It really lowered Mahr in my estimation. I knew in my heart Daisy was a big phony (and I mean BIG), and this verification just made my day.

This American Life works incredibly hard to dot every i and cross every t. This story pales in comparison to the show they did on a particular juvenile judge taking the law in her own hands last year. Serious lawsuits were threatened toward them but they held their ground and their research and reporting in that case was airtight in spite of claims made by opposing lawyers.

Didn't listen to this show. It seemed like the kind of dumb thing that doesn't amuse me, and I was surprised even scheduled it. But Glass has had my utmost respect for many years and I trust that whatever decisions made by him and his staff have been the right ones in light of whatever has happened.

A lot of the regulars on here said weeks ago that this guy's word wasn't worth shit... and yet, how many people continued to use the Mike Daisy vid to prove their point about terrible working conditions at Foxconn.

I think I'll go back and find a few famous quotes...

I think you're confusing This American Life with NPR. This American Life is a program that airs on National Public Radio, which also airs (among other things) news and current events programs. I don't think I've ever heard NPR describe itself as a "premier news outlet", although I'm sure they have standards of journalistic integrity for the news programs they air.

However, This American Life is not a news program. It's a quirky little slice of life documentary/interview program, as filtered through the sensibilities of Ira Glass. They're interested in the varieties of human experience, not in "reporting facts."

The problem they have now is akin to a magazine or internet presence like, say, McSweeny's (a quirky SF based quarterly and website) having published an interview with someone claiming to have seen terrible things in a slaughterhouse. The point of such an interview, in such a publication, is less to blow the lid off the slaughterhouse racket than to explore issues around our relationship to food, or get to know the interviewee and how he came to become passionate about such things, or ruminate on the way modern life insulates us from the sources of our convenience. It's the difference between a literary and journalistic approach to the material.

So in apologizing and retracting, they're making more of an esthetic distinction than a journalistic one. They're saying the larger issues raised or explored in the original piece are malformed (while of course regretting having been a party to disseminating falsehoods). Knowing TAL, they'll turn the retraction episode into a meditation on how trust is formed, what it means to fail in public, the nature of "truth" in these modern times, etc.

I realize this might strike some people as a sort of elaborate distinction without a difference, but if you've ever listened to TAL you'll realize that its entirely possible that many of the people who have appeared on the show have exaggerated, misremembered or simply fabricated their various personal stories. The difference here is that one of those stories intersected with a hot-button topic with larger world ramifications.

Every news organization out there winds up publishing misleading information for one reason or another. Hell, when it comes to stories which would generate a lot of traffic and attention some of the biggest publications are willing to wear blinders just for the attention, the traffic, the advertising revenue. What those organizations don't tend to do is own up to that mistake, investigate, and work to correct it. Especially when the story in question happens to be the most popular story they have ever published in terms of viewership. The quality of This American Life aside, a willingness to get in front of something like this—to investigate and correct the errors—is exactly the sort of quality we should expect from various news organizations. It's just my opinion, but I think this sort of response is misguided.

Frankly, it doesn't sound like you've spent much time listening to Ira Glass or "his show." Each week he begins the show with something like "This American Life brings you a story in three acts... act 1, David Sedaris on what happens when you let the dogs out... act 2...." Yup, definitely pretending to be a sober minded professional journalist.

They definitely screwed up with this episode though.

Just wanted to point out that the photo is of Daisey, not Ira Glass.

This is Ira,

Technically, Marketplace "investigated" this. I doubt This American Life had much choice in the "getting in front of this" part. On the other hand, This American Life has definitely taken ownership of the mistake.

If any of the fabrications were material, Apple should sue him for slander.

At this point, it is important to know what is accurate and what is not. My fear is that many people see things in black or white, and will conclude that because parts were fabricated, all of it is fabricated.

Don't forget Woz!

There's better pay for story-tellers at Faux News where a conservative and his money are soonest to part.

What a fat fucking liar. I remember being bashed to hell when I posted that some of the things he was saying seemed suspicious and unverified. People were taking every single one of his words at face value as if it was the gospel truth, and making him up to be some hero-martyr-while-blower. What a sack of shit this despicable, self-serving, exploitative individual is. Now we see his true motivations, which I suspected all along. If he had an ounce of sincerity about his 'cause' he wouldnt have had to make shit up.

Ah, right. An important correction/distinction.

Still, a wide range of responses were still possible and I'm pretty reassured by the one that was chosen.

So who is signing up to work on Foxconn now? Anyone here? Bueller? Bueller?

So did conditions improve at Foxconn yet?

I guess with this fake story he earned enough to have a tonne fried chicken wings delivered to his stable every year. What would this creap need more.