I thought the original episode contained quite a lot of evidence that Daisey was BSing to some degree, especially since not one analyst they could find for the response thought what he said was true. There were no recordings of actual conversations while he was in China that he could have included, just for the radio show? I thought it was clear that the "iPad is magic" bit was obviously made up since, you know, the whole reason he went to Shenzhen was because they turn on all the iPhones and test the cameras and stuff. Of course they've seen them on.
It certainly wasn't clear to me. That said, this has changed my opinion of things by very little.
Daisey's "this was just theater" is clearly inadequate, seeing as he went through the fact-checking process willingly (and deceptively). But it also seems a bit too skirt-gathery to disavow and retract it so forcefully, especially since TAL airs many pieces that are embellished first-person narratives. They should say we presented this in the wrong mode, it's not an invalid mode, but it was wrong of us to present it this way, and here's what's fiction and what's not. And Daisey should have presented it originally with a some-events-have-been-compressed disclaimer, and when interviewed, fessed up as to what was theatrical art and what was not.
Weirdly, Daisey was on some MSNBC morning show last weekend talking about the vagaries of creative non-fiction and how of course he compresses stuff and re-orders events, etc.
Daisey should have presented it originally with a some-events-have-been-compressed
I mean, he didn't compress events. He invented things that he claimed to have seen firsthand, that he manifestly didn't. If the impression he gave (haven't listened to the thing) is that you can find underaged workers, bunks stacked to the ceiling and workers poisoned and mangled just by showing up at one factory (or in one city), and the truth is that all of those things do exist but are far more rare, then that's pretty much just making shit up to make it look worse. It's not just theatrical. It's fiction.
It sounds like all the things he described have happened, and I'm all for holding the feet of Apple (and all the other tech companies) to the fire, but he lied his ass off in the service of making that happen (and not incidentally, in the service of getting a ton of press for himself and his show), let's be clear.
The turning things on bit didn't phase me, because the nature of factory work is that you generally only see part of the product/process.
To k-sky's point, I think part of why TAL is reacting so strongly is that part of their legitimacy, has been the hard won achievement of convincing people to believe that the non-fiction/reportage parts of the show are accurate despite being stylishly produced and dramtatically presented. Something like this potentially makes all of their work look like half-true pastiche. The "this is just theater" defense seems particularly egregious, since their are good chunks of the monologue in which Daisey says essentially, "I know this seems hard to believe, it was hard for me and my translator to believe while it was happening, but it's exactly what happened." Except that it wasn't.
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I don't exactly know why I'm going presidential. A few people will know who I am anyway.
I just got into an expensive, prestigious, one-year program that might or might not lift me out of career doldrums into something more interesting and remunerative. It might do nothing. It would definitely complicate my next year a whole lot. (Logistics. Uncertainty about my remaining ability to concentrate and write papers and stuff.)
Actually I got in last year, too, but the figure they suggested for student loans was jaw-droppingly, hilariously unrealistic for any sane person. So I have to see if that goes any differently this year.
I'm not exactly ATMing, though input is welcome, especially extravagantly terrible advice if it's funny. I'm just sitting here slightly pleased with myself but mostly shruggish and in need of a drink.
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Yeah, I thought it was obvious that Daisey himself was presenting this as if it was stuff that happened, and it was Glass et al who framed it as "NOT journalism" in a nervous-sounding way.
7: Congratulations! Extravagantly terrible advice: have several drinks and show up to the Dean of Admissions' office to thank him or her in person.
My fingers are crossed for better aid this year, JFK!
Let's everyone who comments regularly give JFK a thousand bucks each!
Maybe if you'd all finally state your incomes I could figure out who is in the best position to sponsor this endeavor.
I think unimaginative made way more money than anyone else talking about how much money they made.
15 is right. uni needs to show some love.
This is closely related to the brew-ha-ha about that D'Agata asshole and his book about the arguments with his fact checker, followed by the realization that the book about fact checking had in turn been highly embellished while pretending to be factual.
17. Tell me more. I hadn't heard about the book being embellished too. Do you have a link, perhaps? This sounds juicy.
JFK, I'm so happy for you! Enjoy your drink(s).
I just tuned into Ira Glass interviewing Daisey and tuned right back out after a few minutes. SO AWKWARD.
Yeah, I read the transcript but I sort of can't imagine listening to it. Even reading it was awkward.
Mike Daisey has some really, really weird ideas about what "truth" means.
So has David Sedaris ever been called out on Santaland Diaries? I'm sure some of that is exaggerated...
@25 Yeah, I'm not so clear on why this supposed to be a horrifying breach of trust. TAL, which I think very highly of, has forever been running stories that are nominally true while obviously not actually true in every detail.
I can see running a corrections story on the Daisy thing, particularly when it got so much exposure, but all the head-shaking and apologies and shame about violating journalistic standards seems like an overreaction. I dunno, it always seemed pretty clear to me what Daisy was doing.
I'm typically one to defend both Apple and TAL against criticism, so I feel like I ought to be all kinds of mad at Mike Daisy. But I'm not feeling it.
The problem, as it always is, is that what's interesting as truth is far less interesting as fiction. Why else do you think this scandal continues to repeat?
Huh. I'm not sure how to describe the bright line, but I have a strong sense of a difference between TAL stories where I'm hearing it as a story, and the precise truth is irrelevant (David Sedaris and his ilk) and where I'd expect literal truth and feel as if they'd done something wrong if they knowingly broadcast a falsehood. I'd put most of their stories in the latter category, and only cut something slack for non-literalism with a strong signal that it was meant that way.
Yeah, I think 29 highlights the difference between Sedaris and Daisey. They're both monologists who write about surprising things that most consumers of a major company do not know about the working conditions there. But Sedaris isn't trying to inspire outrage or tears on behalf of the miserable workers of Macy's Santaland. It is more interesting as fiction. Daisey wants to make you upset at Apple, and in doing so, he's willing to fabricate the very scenes about which he wants you to be upset.
I am usually extremely critical of the "but working conditions there are just not as good and it's normal for them" argument, but I felt like a lot of Daisey's tears were being shed over the fact that teenagers have jobs. I'm like, motherfucker, I've been working since I was 13. Yes, it's totally different to work full-time and more in a residential factory and be taken out of school, but I felt really uncomfortable with his uncomprehending horror that a teenager in that benighted hellscape would have a job.
I keep trying to articulate the dividing lines that LB is talking about in 30 and keep failing, but I think I might have one. Stories that are intended to make me laugh get much more of a free pass on whether their true than stories intended to make me cry or be outraged. I like to laugh. But if you're going to tug at my heartstrings, I need to know whether I'm in fictionland or not.
Yeah, if Sedaris had been pushing for mandatory sexual harassment training for Macy's elves and santas in response to the working conditions he experienced, or some other policy oriented thing, I'd be a lot more concerned about his story's actual factualness.
I'm imagining the fact-checking team asking to talk to Snowball. Was he really called Snowball? Was there a Santa Santa? Etc.
I think Daisey realized he was in the shit when they asked to talk to Cathy. I have a lot of sympathy for rhetorically creative organization of information up until someone asks you, "Did this literally happen?" and you lie and say yes, and lie about the names and contact information of anyone who could verify it. Something should obviously be terribly wrong for you as an author at that point.
Sidaris has talked in terviews about the fact that his stories these days are fact-checked about as thoroughly as any piece of reporting, down to the metaphorical ammounts that he wanted to use in place of dollar figures.
I understand the impulse to stave off the moment when your house of cards collapses (I don't respect it, especially not those shameful times when I've fallen prey to it), but Daisey must have known that crash was coming, and choosing to let it become much more public than it could have been just seems perversely self-destructive.
I think I saw something on Sedaris and fact-checking five or six years ago. Maybe in TNR? Since I haven't read Sedaris, I didn't read the article.
Reference to the Sedaris TNR article. The link to the article isn't working for me.
Interesting. Here's the link to the Sedaris TNR article. There's a bit where Sedaris says that he has a problem doing reporting because he can't exaggerate.
It sounds like Daisey doesn't have that level of self-awareness.
I saw Glass speak a little after the Daisey piece aired a couple of months ago, just as Apple was responding to the publicity and promising to investigate. He said, apparently quite sincerely, that he was feeling amazed and humbled that his show could actually bring about change. (Also that, to his knowledge, this had only happened one other time, in TAL's contribution to the downfall of the horrible Georgia drug-court judge.) So I suspect the reaction now is to do with that—that they thought they were doing something new and important and were especially proud of that and excited about what it might mean for the show's role in the future, and so they're feeling like the rug has been pulled out from under them in a particularly mortifying way.
But also, and without having heard this weekend's episode, TAL's response seems to be of a piece with its approach to interviewing people in general: don't let them just tell you broadly what happened; get details, and especially get them to talk about the emotional ramifications, comfortable or not.
I just want to note that the post title is excellent.
41: Thanks. It's a rare moment when a I get to accept a compliment on a stupid pun
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Graeber, linked by Bertram in a comment to a post by Quiggin, does know a little dialectic
Which brings us back to the original point derived from Marx: that it is almost impossible for someone engaged in a project of action, in shaping the world in some way, to understand fully how their actions simultaneously contribute to (a) re-creating the social system in which they are doing so (even if this is something so simple as a family or office), and thus (b) reflexively reshaping and redefining their own selves.
IOW, anti-racism re-creates racism
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43: In other words, you sell out when you don't sell out, you perpetuate when you destroy, you oppress when you liberate.
Shorter version: Heh.
I'm listening the the TAL episode now. Remember, kids, the lessons of Nixon: it is the cover up, not the crime, that makes the scandal.
Great. I'll just leave the corpses in the laundromat. Easy life. Hooray!
Duhigg is spinning the facts too favorably to Apple. The completely verified stuff is actually really quite bad.
Oh, bob! You're such a maverick!
If the real appeal of factories in China is the flexibility of the supply chain, rather than the cost of labor, isn't that something we could recreate in America if we wanted to bring back manufacturing?
48: That was my impression too. So people getting poisoned were at a different plant. I guess that makes it all ok then.
It would take a lot of organization. A company my dad worked for several years ago was trying to make a toy car entirely within the US and it was nearly impossible, but they did it. Any single company looking to have something made will go abroad because it's so so so much easier. But if the government got involved, created subsidies for US manufacturing, etc., it could be possible.
When exactly did 49 become canon?
On other metablog issues, I officially hate my pseud. O Powers That LB, please grant my petition to change it!
54.1: I first saw it here a few weeks back where it was applied to Bob Kerrey by commenter unknown. I then decided to apply it to our very own Dallas maverick (see comments 380 & 381 in that thread). I've used it a few times since, and I think I saw where Alex did recently, so not really canon, but for me it satisfies some obscure, undoubtedly unworthy, personal need.
Sometimes I'm over my pseud as well. I don't hate it and I've used it here and there for ten years, but I have that "it's only clever to me and it looks very dorky outside of my head" sensation. I don't know what I'd change it to, though. I guess having a pseud is dorky, full stop.
(Inside my head, it's too dark to read.)
I'll trade you your pseud for mine and a bag of magic beans, if you like.
I guess having a pseud is dorky, full stop.
Say what?
61: Exactly. Having a pseudonym is an Unfogged requirement and is followed 100%. No one thinks "John Emerson" or "Bob McManus" are those poster's real names.
I thought Smearcase was suggesting that use of a pseud at all (rather than, say, one's real name) was dorky. While it may be the case that particular pseuds may be dorky on their merits, the employment of one surely serves an important purpose.
God knows there have been blogospheric discussions aplenty here and there over whether 'tis inappropriate somehow to possess and employ a pseudonym, whether honor demands the use of one's real name, and so on, but this strikes me as so much hokum and bunk.
48 nails it--the particular encounters Daisey exaggerated or straight-out fabricated are colorful details, but even if they were all false the facts about Foxconn and other manufacturers remain utterly damning. So his additions being fiction doesn't change anything for me.
Maybe I'm unusual in this respect, though. I almost never find individual stories like this moving when it comes to policy questions. It's horrible to think about the poor guy with the mangled hand, or someone poisoned by n-hexane, but the statistical lens shows whether those stories matter in the larger picture or not.
64.2: Yeah, policy made by heart-wrenching story is nutty but math is hard.
Balloon Juice already made my point, I guess.
Regarding Daisey, the facts about Chinese labour activism are very available. Chinese workers are not poor pitiful creatures in need of the condescension of the ethical consumerism industry. When they are angry, they strike and shut down Foxconn for weeks at a time, or else burn down the local Communist Party headquarters. He could have read pretty much any decent blog on China...and come up with a much more interesting story. I recommend Jamie Kenny's Blood & Treasure, which does regular round-ups from the Chinese blogosphere.
Further, he had the gall to accuse the people from the Chinese press who report on this stuff all the time and occasionally get murdered for it of not reporting on it. Which is just gratuitously offensive even if he wasn't making it up.
burn down the local Communist Party headquarters
When was this?
No one thinks "John Emerson" or "Bob McManus" are those poster's real names.
I already said this, but I only recently realized that Robert Halford was actually a pseud.
Via Blood & Treasure, about how Coptic Popes are chosen:
Once the vote is completed, a blindfolded child will choose the pope from the three candidates with the highest number of votes.
I like it!
(Though being serious for a moment, the bigger problem with elections comes in the "what kind of people become candidates" stage, not the "which candidate wins" stage, so this isn't all *that* ideal, but still. Yay for randomness!)
69: I think I figured that out at the same time.
When was this?
"All the damn time". The CCP estimates there are 180,000 "mass-group incidents", i.e. riots or mass protests, annually. A recently famous and successful one was in Wukan. Jamie Kenny systematically blogs them.
Here's China Labour Bulletin's category for "Strike". China Strikes maps strikes in China.
That said, it's entirely possible both for Chinese workers to be real people with agency and initiative and a willingness to protest bad conditions, and for Westerners to have a constructive role to play, whether as consumers or voters or VPs of Supply Chain Logistics or whatnot.
Seconding 75--though it's incredibly dickish of Daisey to downplay the work of Chinese journalists and bloggers.
The condescension thing is harder to measure, but one of the reasons I personally don't mind that Daisey lied to Ira Glass is that I find him insufferable. (That's mostly a joke.)
In an insufferability contest, Daisey wins hands down.
Is this the political thread? Today's Washington Post article on Obama and the debt talks is utterly damning. He was well to the right of the Senate Democrats and basically was on the edge of selling them out when the Republicans refused to take the win and go home.
78: I don't know, the reporters pissed me off so much with the way they framed it on page 2 that I had to quit reading.
And he was unable to bridge a political divide that had only grown wider since he took office with a promise to change the ways of Washington, underscoring the gulf between the way he campaigned and the way he had governed.Fuck me some "bipartisanship".
If this is the political thread, I have a paranoid theory about Rush Limbaugh's potential downfall that occurred to me when I saw the suggestion on Newsweek's cover that Huckabee is being groomed as his successor. The question of "Why now?" has bothered me, and I think the answer is that the money guys in the conservative movement are tired of him, and feel he has too much power. Specifically, they think he, and his cohort, have dragged the GOP so far to the right that it is losing its usefulness, so they look for a convenient excuse, sponsors start pulling out, the DC media start talking. The king is dead.
"Mister Smearcase" happens to be one of my favorite ever threads.
I like my pseud OK but I liked my last one better. Sometimes I want to revive it and be a freer, less-identifiable commenting phenomenon. Since 90% of my comments have become "I know that dude you're talking about!" it would either end my participation here altogether or make me less of a bore.
I liked your old pseud, k-sky. Although if it was a reference to anything, I never got that.
78: I don't know, PGD. I'm not sure how much of that I'm willing to take as truth on the reporters' say-so. Leaving aside the awful journalistic tone, where did this information come from? (And, well, much as I hate to do this: it's the Washington Post.)
In aspiring to be a readable narrative with storytelling details, that article is basically unreadable. Although it's probably partisanship that makes me say that.
85: Yes, and maybe but I don't think so.
81: You are the only person to get the reference in ten years of use, or at least the only one to tell me so.
83: It was a nod to both the idea of the "Left Coast" and the union I was working for when I invented it (on Plastic.com!).
Forget the bad writing in the article, as usual with the WaPo you have to mine it to get the horrifying details. The Post is usual pretty good on back room Kremlinology (White-Houseology) so I do trust them on this kind of procedural gossip. Basically: Obama was willing to give the Rs almost everything they wanted on the budget, including a rise in the Medicare eligibility age *plus* a cut in the top rate for high earners. He only had to back down because A) the tea party crazies wouldn't settle for a 90 percent, and B) the Senate Gang of Six (including such liberal stalwarts as Tom Coburn and Saxby Chambliss) came out with a plan that made his look too conservative!
57: I belatedly claim comment 308 in the other thread, and place a claim for partial authorship of a semi-canonical phrase.
I do concede that in my version the first "b" was capitalized and making it lower-case changes everything.
89: I admit it is strange. I suppose my first question is: did he not know that the Gang of Six was working on a proposal? And not know its rough outlines? That seems ... surprising. I'd have expected, rather, that he did know, and intended all along to back out of the Boehner deal, crying that he couldn't possibly agree to it now, in light of the Gang of Six, as any fool can clearly see, but it's not his fault, because he was trying for a deal before that!
That does suppose quite a bit of bluffing on his (and his staff's) part. I don't know the truth of the matter; still not willing to wholly believe the WaPo piece just on its say-so. It seems to have an agenda, to paint Obama as a craven dupe. Maybe it's correct, but as it stands it's just a "WaPo says this" data point. Duly noted.