Mike Daisey responds
mikedaisey.blogspot.com.au
mikedaisey.blogspot.com.au
I have problems with someone re-iterating the sincerity of their apology followed by "but". Standing by an apology means not machine-gunning it with caveats seconds later.
"I told Ira that story should always be subordinate to the truth, and I still believe that. Sometimes I fall short of that goal, but I will never stop trying to achieve it."
The indignation in this statement is toxic. Dishonesty - fabricating facts and then dissembling to cover it up - is not an oopsie that we try and avoid. Trust is a cornerstone of civilization and more so for anyone in a journalist-activist function. Having a position doesn't entitle you to make up facts. Having an audience that should fact-check aggressively doesn't mean you get to actively challenge this faculty.
You assumed we, the audience, were too dumb to get the meaning from the actual facts and so juiced it up in accordance with how much brighter than us you know yourself to be. Now you're playing the victim.
You asked people to open their eyes and think critically. Sorry we didn't stay on the hamster wheel as we were supposed to.
For example, he could have talked about the N-Hexane poisoning without lying. He could have cited news reports, or traveled to interview people, or done it over the phone, or even gotten the info from secondhand interviews. He could have said "imagine a man who..." and proceeded to paint a painful picture based on the facts that were already public.
But he didn't. He chose to pretend he had met these people. He would say that made the story more emotionally impactful, and maybe that's true. But it also poisoned it. It was a very condescending move to pull on his audiences; there is neither artistic nor factual integrity in it.
If he had stuck to the facts, he would still have had a great performance. Too bad.
Everything else appeared to be merely stretching the truth, retelling factual events as if they were witnessed first hand, and other things for which I'd be willing to grant some artistic license, provided it were told with a disclaimer.
I can't believe that he met a 13 y/o factory worker who spoken English.
I wish people would stop excusing his bullshit. This goes way beyond 'stretching'.
If you listen to the latest TAL you'll hear what I mean. It's conceivable (though very unlikely) that he met a 13 year old -- while the interpreter was distracted -- who spoke enough English to say she was 13. However, when Ira asks him directly whether the supposed 13 year old said her friend was 12, or if he just assumed (i.e. fabricated) that she was, he has no answer. It's the one place where he has absolutely nowhere to go: he can't claim artistic license with retelling of factual news reports, and he can't claim the interpreter simply wasn't listening at the time, he simply talked himself into a corner.
Hope this dude goes down in flames forever. No character trait I hate more in the world than people who have convinced themselves that it's ok to lie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443272/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1611224/
Clearly one of these is an outright fabrication of the events of Lincoln's life.
In the other Steven Spielberg is going to produce a film that is 100% fabricated and yet people are going to gush about the truth of Abe Lincoln that it captures. The sets will be fake. Most of the dialogue will be made up and dramaticized. No one will question this. No one will care.
Mike's issue was that he wanted to do more and he shouldn't have. He should have stayed off of NPR, out of print, and off the talk shows.
I still think that his show is closer to "Lincoln: The sixteenth President of the United States guides the North to victory during the Civil War" than "Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter: Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, discovers vampires are planning to take over the United States. He makes it his mission to eliminate them."
This comment is pretty offensive. Journalists do tell stories, but they make sure those stories are true, verified, factual.
> Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers.
But now people will assume that the facts about abusive conditions at developing nation factories (not just China) are created by people like Daisey; that they're on a par with 'babies burning to make iPhones'.
Using babies to make his point is particularly unfortunate because there are suspicions that some factories force women to have abortions. Obviously abortion is so political and polarised it's impossible to find any credible data. Most people agree that forced abortions (whether from the state but especially from employers) are not acceptable. Here's one newspaper article, which doesn't mention factories.
(http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/2/women-forced-...)
In general, life for poor people in China sucks. That doesn't mean we should accept abuse in factories to produce luxury goods for rich people.
Exactly.
I heard many horrible stories about Foxconn from my friends. They should be exposed and punished. But fabrication is definitely wrong. It is especially so for a journalist reporter.
For example, it is simply not true that factoreis could <b>force</b> abortions. Only the government has the authority to force abortion due to the one-child policy. Foxconn is a private factory. Pregnant women would for sure get discriminated against in Foxconn. They decide to either quit, or choose abortion to keep the job. Discrimination against pregnant women is definitely wrong. But such discrimination and forced abortion are completely two matters.
As a side note, discrimination against pregnant women is a wide-spread matter in private companies in China. A good friend of mine worked in the China headquarter of one of the "big four". Her boss gave her such a hard time when my friend got pregnant and could not work 12 hours a day. My friend simply quit. She is a happy mom now.
Some of them do. Sadly, it's somewhat of a dying art. The retraction episode of This American Life might be the apex of such activity in traditional journalism for all we know. Most other news outlets fall far short of that standard.
There is awesome investigative journalism going on. We even hold two conferences a year about it, one focused on investigative stuff specifically (http://ire.org/conferences/ire-2012/ ), and one focusing on news technology (http://ire.org/conferences/nicar-2012/ ).
I certainly can't claim that investigative reporting (or any reporting really) is doing as well as it has in the past, given the massive attrition in the news industry, but there are a lot of reporters out there who are fighting the good fight.
We even put out a newsletter of investigative stories: http://ire.org/blog/extra-extra/
Edit: don't forget ProPublica's awesome #muckreads blog (http://projects.propublica.org/muckreads/ ).
As far as I can tell Mike is only sorry he got caught.
Yes, Chinese labor sucks compared to a fat American lifestyle, but hyperbole and outright fabrication has now trivialized that issue. A good reporter does not insert themselves into the story if they're serious about the subject matter.
What is flawed is that journalists continue to mistake his one man show for investigative reporting. The extent to which it is occurring borders on the deliberate.
Rob Schmitz's investigation is the journalistic equivalent to revealing that Julius Caesar could not have said:
Forget not, in your speed, Antonius,
To touch Calpurnia; for our elders say,
The barren, touched in this holy chase,
Shake off their sterile curse.
Schmitz should be able to distinguish between a news report and entertainment. He should be able to provide context for the large themes in Daisey's performance given that they coincide with his own journalistic reports for Marketplace. He could have done actual journalism, instead he conflated theater with journalism and then revealed it as theater while pretending to conduct journalism.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/apple-economy/app....
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/apple-economy/china-c....
Ira Glass from the transcript of the original This American Life piece:
When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story on stage,
when I left the theater I had a lot of questions.
I mean, he's not a reporter, and I wondered,
did he get it right?
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/t....
"THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION."
https://twitter.com/#!/afgld/status/181439210643931136/photo...
Daisey doesn't understand that, "I'm sorry. I lied. Please forgive me," would have went a lot further than what he's doing now.
As apologies go, a raised middle finger on the way out the door would convey the same sentiment less disingenously.
I've been following Mike Daisey for a few years. He's really good at what he does and he's really open with his fan base. You can find a number of his monologues here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/mike-daisey/id2085588?mt=1... (I particularly liked the Nicola Tesla Monologue)
Notice that he has one called 'All Stories Are Fiction'.
I think Mike got caught up in a multi-media world when he's a one media kind of guy. That media is theater. It is a world where people pay lots of money to watch other people try as hard as they can to convince the viewers that they are in the streets of Paris and there is a might battle being waged. In the end the audience feels something. And that is the goal.
The problem is that Mike let this 'feel something' get ahead of the burden that the programs he was appearing on are under.
If Mike Daisey comes to your town and you don't go because of this, you're being petty and missing a great show.
That being so, he should get away from journalism because people that produce that content have no room for theater.*
*of course there is fox news.
"If you don't give money to someone because of their past of intellectual dishonesty, you're being petty" doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
I should have said if you don't go hear someone tell a story because of their past storytelling, you're being petty.
I think he got caught up in the fact that he started having an effect(and one that was needed) and didn't know how to operate in that environment.
Please stop making excuses for this piece of shit.
To hell with "should" or "shouldn't" -- he did. And you're accusing people who wouldn't give him money to see his show because of what he did of "being petty."
That's incorrect. He lied in his story; then he lied to people who were trying to fact-check his story.
He said "This is true" about things that were not true.
I think that's a really important, fair point. Whatever this guy lied about with regard to his personal experiences in China, those things are minor compared to the truth of the situation. I really wish he hadn't done that. He didn't need to lie -- the story is so fundamentally awful that it stands without the minor things he fabricated. But now people are dismissing the whole message.
The dramatic indignation in the other comments in this thread is predictable, unenlightening, and unhelpful -- far more heat than light. The most dangerous thing about this controversy is that people will take knee-jerk reactions to Daisey as an indication that nothing is wrong with the world of electronics. And that's a tragedy, in the most traditional sense of the word.
I'm bothered, in part, by the fact that Apple is the target in all these attacks. There are some very large questions on the table here, and Apple is but one player. Arguably, they're putting the most effort in to trying to improve. Where's the outrage for Samsung? For HTC? For Dell?
How about western consumers? Even those of us who are aware of the issues, yet somehow find a way to resolve spending $499 on our latest 9.7 inches of retina exploitation? Even further, what happens to the world economy without $300/month labor by the millions?
I guess a narrative needs a villain. I just hope that everyone maintains some sense of perspective. We're not talking about the practices of one corporation here. We're talking about a major component of consumerist culture. That's the conversation, and it's being ignored at every turn.
The straw man is dead. Long live the straw man.
What's more dangerous is what this suggests the proper reaction is to be. You're right, it is a tragedy that the message people take away from this might be that things aren't as bad over there as we hear. And it's a tragedy of his own doing because he directly contributed to that message by telling us things that weren't true.
I guess nobody told him the story of the boy who cried wolf when he was little.
Nice bit of misdirection there.
That's enough nowadays, isn't it?</satire>
Dude got caught. The Dateline piece confirmed your untruths. Man up!
It's convenient, I suppose. When his journalism falls short, he calls himself a performer. When his stories are incredulous, he calls himself a journalist.
what a guy.
For example: A huge part of the story was about 12 and 13 year old kids that Daisy met at the factory gates. He says he saw lots of them, and he suggests that this is the norm. Other reports suggest this is very rare.
The story isn't true using the conventional definition of true... and it isn't true even using Daisy's theatrical definition of true.