Mike Daisey and This American Life's Retraction of his Monologue

[wilsonbiggs 10]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/03/16/148761812/this-american-life-retracts-mike-daiseys-apple-factory-story


"Some of the falsehoods found in Daisey's monologue are small ones: the number of factories Daisey visited in China, for instance, and the number of workers he spoke with. Others are large. In his monologue he claims to have met a group of workers who were poisoned on an iPhone assembly line by a chemical called n-hexane. Apple's audits of its suppliers show that an incident like this occurred in a factory in China, but the factory wasn't located in Shenzhen, where Daisey visited.
"'It happened nearly a thousand miles away, in a city called Suzhou,' Marketplace's [Rob] Schmitz says in his report. 'I've interviewed these workers, so I knew the story. And when I heard Daisey's monologue on the radio, I wondered: How'd they get all the way down to Shenzhen? It seemed crazy, that somehow Daisey could've met a few of them during his trip.'
"In Schmitz's report, he confronts Daisey and Daisey admits to fabricating these characters.
"'I'm not going to say that I didn't take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,' Daisey tells Schmitz and Glass. 'My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it's not journalism. It's theater.'"

Edited March 16, 2012 by wilsonbiggs