In an episode aired on This American Life in January of 2012, the performer Mike Daisey discussed his monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs about his experiences visiting Chinese factories producing Apple products. The monologue exposed the poor manufacturing conditions in those factories and led the audience to question the morality behind overseas production practices. But a correspondent for Marketplace in China, Rob Schultz, raised questions about that story.
Three months after the initial program, This American Life aired a follow-up episode, “Retraction,” that took back the previous story because thanks to Schultz’s critical questioning, it discovered that Daisey’s story contained many fabrications. Although most of Daisey’s accounts described real working conditions in Chinese factories, many of them were not gathered firsthand as he indicated.
Was Daisey’s story important? Yes.
Was Daisey’s story impactful? Yes.
Was Daisey’s story true? No.
Primary sources call for a different level of scrutiny than secondary ones and Daisey blurred these distinctions because he wanted to gain that level of trust. As Daisey said, “I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of my trip. And so when I was building the scene of that meeting, I wanted to have the voice of this thing that had been happening, that everyone had been talking about.”
The follow-up This American Life program highlighted the fundamental differences between journalism and theater. Daisey said it himself. “My main mistake, the mistake I truly regret,” he told the program, “is that I had it on your show as journalism. And it’s not journalism. It’s theater. It uses the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc.” Daisey’s creative interpretation may have been okay for theater, but not for journalism.
This American Life made a mistake, but it knew where to draw the line and amend for that mistake. As its host, Ira Glass, said at the start of the program, “I and my co-workers here at This American Life, we are not happy to have done anything to hurt the reputation of the journalism that happens on this radio station every day. So we want to be completely transparent about what we got wrong and what we now believe is the truth.” The program displayed journalistic accountability and responsibility.
It went back and contacted Daisey’s translator, Cathy Lee, to hash out what really happened. And “Retraction” concluded with an updated account of manufacturing working conditions in China from factual reports done by the New York Times. It also left the audience with the same question Daisey had been getting at: do we feel comfortable knowing that our consumption habits further harsh conditions for others? But this time, all of the facts behind the story were true.
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