The New York Times has updated it’s Mike Daisey op-ed with the following:
Editor’s Note: Questions have been raised about the truth of a paragraph in the original version of this article that purported to talk about conditions at Apple’s factory in China. That paragraph has been removed from this version of the article.
Here is the paragraph that they excised, which I was able to find here:
I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.
As the press release (pdf) from This American Life confirms this is one of the stories that Daisey’s translator denies ever occurred. So I think Daisey perhaps needs to expand his apology which says his only regret is allowing This American Life to excerpt from his monologue, which was theater and not journalism:
What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic - not a theatrical - enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret.
Writing an op-ed for the New York Times is also not theater, so I’m thinking we will not remain his “only regret” for long.
I’m hearing a lot of people say the real tragedy is that the things Daisey pretended he saw actually do happen and this whole debacle does a disservice to that truth. I side more with the wise Adam Minter, who is quoted here by Rob Schmitz, the journalist that caught Daisey in the first place:
“People like a very simple narrative,” said Adam Minter, a columnist for Bloomberg who’s spent years visiting more than 150 Chinese factories. He’s writing a book about the scrap recycling industry.
He says the reality of factory conditions in China is complicated—working at Foxconn can be grueling, but most workers will tell you they’re happy to have the job. He says Daisey’s become a media darling because he’s used an emotional performance to focus on a much simpler message:
“Foxconn bad. iPhone bad. Sign a petition. Now you’re good,” Minter says. “That’s a great simple message and it’s going to resonate with a public radio listener. It’s going to resonate with the New York Times reader. And I think that’s one of the reasons he’s had so much traction.”
And Minter says the fact that Daisey has not told the truth to people about what he saw in China won’t have much of an impact on how the public sees this issue.
Minter’s criticism of the overly simplistic story that misses the complicated reality of China’s factory conditions was true before Daisey’s lies were exposed, and they are true still.
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
Friday ~ March 16th, 2012 at 5:00 pm
neil
Fine, but let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? Daisey claimed he saw underage children working in FoxConn factories. Now we know he did not actually see them. Does that mean they weren’t there? Most decidedly not; Apple, to its credit, published the results of a 2010 investigation last year that found 91 underage workers in 10 facilities. But I bet they’re grateful for today’s “very simple narrative” that the journalist who said he saw children making iPads was lying.
Sunday ~ March 18th, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Ryan P
At the super-duper very least, you’d at least have to say that they’re not so shockingly common that if you talk to 50 workers, several of them are going to be pre-teens (or more than that, because Daisey was claiming that was just the ones who spoke English and would be willing to risk their jobs by telling the first random white dude in a Hawaiian shirt who walked through the door). Ditto for all of the other claims he made.
And no, it’s not helped that his response has bordered on the sociopathic — ok, these things aren’t “literally true in a journalistic sense” but they’re “true in a theatrical sense” (“truthy” one might say), and the shame to him is just that they take away from convincing people of the broader truth of Foxconn Bad. Trade Bad. Trade Causes Poverty. The End.
Saturday ~ March 17th, 2012 at 10:45 pm
Jeff
Let’s call this what it is, Daisey’s behavior was despicable. He lied, lied repeatedly, lied knowingly. His post-modern notions on ‘emotional truth’ do not justify allowing his [theater / lies] to be reported as accurate journalistic reporting. Moreover, he did a disservice to his cause, it’s a shame that more people on the left can’t quite follow that. The truth is complicated and it’s not clear that the whole, on balance, is for the worse, at least for those workers at that point in space and time. Nonetheless, a case could have been made for improving worker’s conditions without lying.
On the other hand, it’s worth noting that NPR / an NPR reporter uncovered this, and corrected it. When is the last time that Fox ran a major story exposing the lies that had underlain a previous attention-grabbing story that catered to the biases of their audience?
Sunday ~ March 18th, 2012 at 4:04 pm
The extent of Mike Daisey’s lies « Modeled Behavior
[...] tradeoffs. The former is how Mike Daisey tried to portray things, and the latter is how people like Adam Minter see it. In fact on an episode of On Point with Warren Olney, Adam Minter argues: [...]