by insomniasexx

So when they first announced the retraction I didn't think the retraction was warranted. My views have now changed 180 degrees because there are actually a huge number of errors and flat out lies. I initially thought that Ira Glass & TAL had determined some facts were wrong, facts they had failed to fact check or it was revealed that certain facts they had thought were true were actually false.

The reality is that a lot of Daisey's story is pure fiction. I stated earlier that I thought that being an act of theatre he was allowed to embellish some details, allowed to get some numbers wrong, allowed to push the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction more than a journalist can. However, as Ira Glass points out in the retraction story, it wasn't just embellishments. It was lies and, furthermore, it has even been determined that he lied to Ira Glass and the production team as they prepared the initial story. They repeatedly told him that they wanted the story to be journalism and stand up to the standards of journalism. And then he lied to them. I find this inexcusable.

Daisey's story makes the audience feel, it makes the audience have emotions for the factory workers and to rethink how products we use everyday are made. The story captured me in a way that neither journalism nor a movie nor a book has in a long time. Even as I listened to it, I knew this was a great story. I knew that not everything was true. (Note: I now realize that most TAL listeners didn't go to film school and didn't spend 4 years deconstructing stories and analyzing what makes a story great. Because of my experiences at NYU, I know more about stories than most do, especially those who listen to TAL regularly and accept everything as journalism.)

I figured at the end Ira would fact check and put a disclosure on the things that weren't true. At art school I saw small events in peoples lives turn into amazing pieces. One of the greatest things about was watching the people around you take an idea or an event or an experience and create something where it is fully realized. But in the process it transforms and warps and rarely is very similar to the initial inspiration. This is fine, as long as you don't act like every creation is literally true.

I felt conflicted because there are facts and then there are larger truths. Some pieces of pure fiction can reveal truth better than reality. I learned this when I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. In it he says of war "A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth." That is how I first thought about Daisey's story when it was revealed that TAL was retracting the story. A part of me still feels this way, except that I am currently repressing these thoughts because of my anger towards Daisey. As I type this, I am realizing that Daisey's work can still be viewed in this way, however it is complicated. You have the things Daisey says happened which actually happened, which he actually experienced. You have the lies, like the guards with guns. You have the things he says he saw but he didn't, like meeting the people deformed by n-hexane. But people have been deformed by n-hexane. He just didn't meet them and they didn't happen in the factories he visited. And this is what saddens me the most. The fact that unless someone looks past the headlines that have been rampaging through the media the last few days, you won't know these things. You may just assume it is all a lie. Or no one has been affected by n-hexane. You may just think Daisey is a fuckwit who should be ignored for eternity and forget all the emotions and thoughts that you formed when you listened to his monologue on Apple.

I wrongly assumed that there was enough fact-truth in Daisey's story that the errors and embellishments didn't matter because it made me think, it made feel, and it had a larger picture in mind. A larger truth. The small details, the change in timeline, the addition of whether it was a sunny day or a rainy day, whatever it may be, those are allowed. Those make a series of events into an emotional story.

However, after listening to This American Life's Retraction piece, I am angry. Huge parts of the story are completely fictional. Quite ironically, Daisey once did a monologue about James Frey (author of Million Little Pieces - if you remember Frey got busted that the memoir was a work of fiction and Ophah drama and all sorts of shit went down) and talked about fiction vs truth vs fact in his monologue about him:

"Daisey admits in the monologue that he once fabricated a monologue because it connected with the audience. After telling this lie over and over it became so integrated into the architecture of his piece that it became impossible to remove, or perhaps to distinguish what really happened.”

:O

What really changed my opinion of Daisey and of his story comes about halfway through:

And he writes at the top “Here’s a list of things I want to run by you. Some are questions I have just for clarifying facts and in a few I’ve suggested minor language tweaks for accuracy” – this is like for numbers, and he writes “Being that news stations are obviously a different kind of form than the theater we wanted to make sure that this thing is totally, utterly unassailable by anyone who might hear it.”

And then you wrote back to him, you said, “I totally get that. I want you to know that makes sense to me. A show built orally for the theater is different than what typically happens from news stations. I appreciate you taking the time to go over this.” And so you, like, you understood that we wanted it to be completely accurate in the most traditional sense

This is what transformed what could've been a mistake, or a misunderstanding, or a theater vs journalism or a combination of them into a blatant and inexcusable lie. This is why I am angry. And this is why I no longer have any respect for Daisey. They gave him an out, they ask him straight up, and he just fucking lies. I thought that he had nobel reasons for writing the monologue and for going to see the factories and the workers first hand. Now, I really don't. I think he is greedy for fame and for money and to have his story heard. Too greedy. And while I am disappointed the revelation that he lied has taken all the attention off of an important issue, I doubt he is. He's just disappointed he got caught.

---

The thing I remember thinking over and over when I listened to it yesterday on my walk to the beach was "Holy shit...this is painful to listen to." It makes you squirm. TAL leaves in the huge pauses when they interview (interrogate?) Daisey. You can hear his world crash down around him in the utter silence.

The following is the logical side of myself coming out. I like lists. So I made one.

LIES

1. They wanted to factcheck with his interpreter, Cathy. They later say "we should've killed the story after he told us he had no way to reach her.

And when we asked for her information he told us her real name wasn't Cathy, it was Anna and he had a cellphone number for her but he said when he tried it, it didn't work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.

2.

And the guards look pissed. They look really pissed, and they are carrying guns.

The guards don't carry guns, ever. It's illegal.

3.

And I say to them, how do you know who's right to work with you? How do you find people to help you organize? And they look at each other bashfully, and they say well, we talk a lot. We have lots of meetings, and we meet at coffeehouses and different Starbucks in Guangzhou.

Nope. Factory workers make $15-$20/day, they don't go to Starbucks.

4. He sticks to his story about meeting 12-15 year old workers, repeatedly. Ira and Rob (the marketplace guy) both ask him over and over and over. Cathy says she would've remember that. Apple audits reveal they have caught 91 underage workers (out of 100,000+) Mike later says:

of the girl who was thirteen and her friends who represented themselves as being around her age and so the spread there is just an effort to cover the ages that I suspect they are around that age.

At this point I just wanted to tell him to STFU.

5. N-hexane iPhone screen cleaner. Cathy says no one mentioned Hexane.

Two years ago, workers at an Apple supplier were poisoned by n-Hexane. It was all over the news in China. But this didn’t happen in Shenzhen. It happened nearly a thousand miles away, in a city called Suzhou. 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

Daisey revises his story and says:

That’s correct. I met workers in Hong Kong going to Apple protests who had not been poisoned by hexane but had known people who had been, and it was like a constant conversation we were having about those workers. So no, they were not at that meeting… I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of 11 my trip. 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 been talking about.

Srsly. Just shut up.

Later:

Rob Schmitz: Let’s talk about the hexane poisoned workers. Cathy says that you did not talk to workers who were poisoned by hexane and were shaking uncontrollably.

Mike Daisey: That’s correct. I met workers in Hong Kong going to Apple protests who had not been poisoned by hexane but had known people who had been, and it was like a constant conversation we were having about those workers. So no, they were not at that meeting

6. The taxi ride on the exit ramp Daisey says petered out into thin air 85 feet up off the ground (Daisey says he did this when he wasn't with Cathy.

7. The factory dorm rooms Daisey claims they saw. Cathy says they never saw any dorm rooms. (Daisey says he saw them without Cathy and only added the part about the cameras in the dorm rooms, but there were cameras in the hallways.)

Grrr...

EMBELLISHMENTS

1.

Daisey makes it sound like he talked to lots of workers - in interviews he’s said hundreds - but Cathy says it was maybe 50 people on the outside -they were just at Foxconn’s gates for two mornings.

2.

In his monologue he says he visited Foxconn’s gates and then decided to pose as a businessman to get tours of factories. In fact, he visited Foxconn the morning after he arrived in Shenzen a factory called KTC technology that very afternoon. It was all set up in advance.

3.

Daisey told Ira that he and Cathy visited 10 factories, posing as business people. Cathy says it was only 3.

Later Daisey says it was 5.

4.

Then there’s the meeting Daisey says he had with workers from an unauthorized union, a secret union. Cathy confirmed that this did happen. Daisey told Ira that they met with 25-30 workers, in an all-day meeting. Cathy remembers 2 workers, she says maybe there were 2 or 3 others, and it was couple hours over lunch, at a restaurant.

Mike later revises his number to 10.

5. This one is on the border.

…and I take out my iPad. And when he sees it, his eyes widen, because one of the ultimate ironies of globalism, at this point there are no iPads in China. …. He's never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen, and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view, and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand, and the icons slide back and forth. And he says something to Cathy, and Cathy says, "he says it's a kind of magic."

Cathy says this scene is like a movie.

Cathy does remember this guy. But she says the man never told them he had ever worked at Foxconn.

6.

Even the conversation where Cathy warns Daisey that interviewing workers at the gates of Foxconn wouldn’t work….of course it would work, she told me. She’s taken other foreigners to Foxconn and other factory gates for years — it’s part of her job. It always works.

To finish, ironic quote of the year award: Yeah I think the truth always matters, truth is tremendously important. I don’t live in a subjective universe where everything is up for grabs. I really do believe that stories should be subordinate to the truth.

edit 1 (4:16pm gmt-10) : got rid of (some?) typos, made my thought and feelings in the first paragraphs more complete.

edit 2: MORE THOUGHTS! MORE COMPLETE LIST!