(Well it had to be something like that.)
I have three thoughts on This American Life‘s retraction of its episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” If you do not involve yourself with public radio, Apple, or the Internet, briefly: Mike Daisey likes Apple products but stories about how they were made in China concerned him. So he went to China and developed a one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” Taken by the show, This American Life aired an episode consisting largely of extracts from it. Hearing the program, people who knew things about China, particularly Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, began asking questions about oddities and discrepancies in the story, many of whose factual details then, I think it’s fair to say, fell completely apart under examination, as this exchange between Ira Glass and Daisey in the “Retraction” program illustrates:
Ira Glass: … I think it’s OK for somebody in your position to say it isn’t all literally true, know what I mean, feel like actually it seems like it’s honest labeling, and I feel like that’s what’s actually called for at this point, is just honest labeling. Like, you make a nice show, people are moved by it, I was moved by it and if it were labeled honestly, I think everybody would react differently to it.
Mike Daisey: I don’t think that label covers the totality of what it is.
Ira Glass: That label – fiction?
Mike Daisey: Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important.
Ira Glass: I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says ‘this happened to me,’ I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labeled as ‘here’s a work of fiction.’
It’s important, I think, if you’re considering this story, that you listen to the last portion of “Retraction,” in which Glass talks to NYT reporter Charles Duhigg about scrupulously factual accounts of Apple’s manufacturing in China.
Now, the thoughts.
(1) The first, Felix Salmon touches tangentially on here.
Ira Glass says that This American Life should have scrapped the idea of doing a Mike Daisey show the minute he told their fact-checkers that he had no way of contacting his translator. But maybe the mistake was made even earlier, when This American Life decided that a theatrical monologue could ever be held to standards of journalistic accuracy. This one certainly couldn’t, and in that I think it’s more the rule than the exception.
The thing is, This American Life has always aired a range of narratives, from straight-up fiction through to (what I presume to be) carefully reported journalism. It has aired plenty of dramatic monologues, and I have never supposed them to be verifiable reportage.
I mean: if tomorrow David Sedaris’s sisters should come forward and say, yes, they were mean to him, but they didn’t say this insult on that trip to the North Carolina shore … I’m not sure how rocked my world would be. Is the error entirely Mike Daisey’s, in supposing This American Life would be okay with a dramatic story rooted in, if not consisting entirely of, fact?
That said, or asked, I think it’s clear that at some point in the fact-checking process Mike Daisey should have realized that TAL were asking more of him than they ask of dramatic monologists.
(2) The second thing is this. Salmon says, the thing that should tip us off in the Daisey story is “the white man’s burden: the idea that a white American like Mike Daisey or Jason Russell (or Jeff Sachs, for that matter) is a selfless hero, doing good for the poor and exploited in other continents.”
Yes … and yet. There is something about this idea, that you holding an iPad or iPhone are implicated in a morally dubious structure that you can change almost as it were with a click of the home button … there is something about this idea that seems like the right idea. It reminds me of Thomas Haskell’s account of the relation between capitalism and the humanitarian sensibility.
We cannot regard ourselves as causally involved in another’s suffering unless we see a way to stop it. We must perceive a causal connection, a chain made up of cause-and-effect links, that begins with some act of ours as cause and ends with the alleviation of the stranger’s suffering as effect. We must, in short, have a technique, or recipe, for intervening – a specific sequence of steps that we know we can take to alter the ordinary course of events.
This sense not only of connection to another’s suffering, but capacity to act in relief of that suffering, was – Haskell tells us – an artifact of the capitalist marketplace in the eighteenth century and an essential element in the development of abolitionism. You could do something – something, Haskell says, that is itself ordinary, of such “ease of operation that our failure to [act] would constitute a suspension of routine, an out-of-the-ordinary event, possibly even an intentional act in itself.”
Capitalism, Haskell says, contributed “[o]nly a precondition, albeit a vital one” to abolitionism – “a proliferation of recipe knowledge and consequent expansion of the conventional limits of causal perception and moral responsibility”. Capitalism lets you involve yourself, by your purchases, in the lives of distant others. By the ordinary choice of what to buy you support certain systems of production.
Pressed to come up with a modern analogue to abolitionism, Haskell thought of vegetarianism. Writing in 1985, he supposed that later generations might regard the benighted meat-eaters of our time as involved in an obviously immoral system of production, one that they should have found easy to abandon precisely because they lived among vegetarians, and knew that it was sustainable, this life without meat.
I wonder whether, if Haskell had written the same essay twenty-five years later, he might have found it easier to reach for worries over the working conditions in offshored manufacturing as an analogue to abolitionism.
(3) There is a Gresham’s law of argumentation, and Mike Daisey’s bad story has crowded out good ones, at least for now.
6 comments
March 18, 2012 at 7:34 pm
Jesse A.
I’m very interested in Haskell’s idea. Can you provide a citation to the essay so I can check it out? Thanks.
March 19, 2012 at 12:26 am
Ben
Jesse: it’s from an essay called “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility”. Wherever I’ve seen it it’s been split up into a couple parts, and the quoted passage is in part 1. It can be read in its entirety as chapter 4 of this essay collection on Google books: http://books.google.com/books?id=G6WIntV9jZ0C
As for the post: the Sedaris comparison is a little strained. People respond to Sedaris’ stuff because there are amusing and poignant stories told well. Whether they actually happened or not is beside the point, for the most part. He could have done some kind of Faulkner thing and made his stories about the inhabitants of a made-up county in North Carolina (with excursions to France), borrowing liberally from his own life but not claiming the stories are based in fact, and they would be just as powerful. Whereas the truth and veracity of the Daisey material is the source of its rhetorical power; it’s moving because we believe it’s true.
Suppose his monologue was clearly advertised as fiction, but evoked parallels with Foxconn that TAL’s audience couldn’t miss; “Freedonia” houses its workers in cramped dorms, working 12+ hour shifts to put together frivolous little gadgets that Americans cherish, the workers’ legs swelling up to the point they can’t walk, suicides, etc. Would we respond to that story as we did to what Daisey actually said? I don’t think so.
There’s going to be some narrative considerations taken when someone tries to tell a true story in this format, it’s inevitable. But that doesn’t affect the underlying mechanism which makes this material powerful, which is that the author/performer isn’t going to say stuff that isn’t true. Daisey’s work relied on the audience believing that mechanism was in effect when it wasn’t.
March 19, 2012 at 10:34 am
Jesse A.
Ben, thanks!
March 20, 2012 at 11:57 am
Stephen Frug
I’m not so sure that it’s true that Sederis’s claim to truth are irrelevant to his stories’ success. Alex Heard, in this old essay from TNR, makes a good argument that it’s not — in particular, that one story he told as fiction fell totally flat, which, retold as truth, was received as powerful. Heard’s argument is here:
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/american-lie-midget-guitar-teacher-macys-elf-and-thetruth-about-david-sedaris
March 20, 2012 at 6:43 pm
Dale
The “Retraction” episode was the most dishonest episode I’ve ever heard — on Ira Glass’ part. The responsibility he seems to portrays of meeting a journalistic standard of truth — what he calls a “normal” worldview at one point — elides the way he and his staff play with journalistic conventions all the time. Either Glass is being quite dishonest in saying he believed Daisey’s show was 100% truthful by journalistic standards (despite the fact that he bought a ticket to get into a theater to hear it) or he is a quite unsophisticated media consumer. Judging by more than a decade of excellent work, I’d say the former is more likely and he’s gotten an earful from friends and family at places like the NYT and he’s gun-shy because of conservative attacks on NPR.
The absolute WORST was the NYT reporter who kept giving the senselessly evenhanded conventions, saying more or less “I get two conflicting stories and I report them both, and it’s up to the audience to decide,” as if that was the point of journalism. I always liked TAL because I thought the staff realized they were something different than that (and I submit, better) and were willing to take positions.
Of course, the best part was the irony that when they left Mike Daisey, Glass said “Act Three,” to introduce the next segment, as he always does — to signify that they recognize themselves as entertainment and have edited and structured the narrative of the show to meet the performative conventions of stage and screen rather than newspaper and nightly news, something Glass spent the rest of the hour denying.
March 21, 2012 at 10:11 am
Student
Mike Daisey’s interview with Glass was bizarre and uncomfortable. I think this whole affair was motivated by self interest.
However, I disagree with the comment “the mistake was made even earlier, when This American Life decided that a theatrical monologue could ever be held to standards of journalistic accuracy.” Not to get too crunchy granola but at least theatre is a medium that employs both people and words in its storytelling pursuits (you know like real life). The Laramie Project has been widely acclaimed for its use use of interviews and news reports to show what hate crimes and homophobia looks like. Furthermore, from Kabuki to Arthur Miller, Shakespeare to Teatro Campesino theatre has presented controversial contemporary/current events through analogy, while providing a stage upon which the marginalized may communicate their experiences to others.
Dale I don’t think this ‘act three’ structure indicates that TAL views itself as entertainment. History and journalism employ storytelling conventions. This is the way a grandmother explains her childhood to her grandson, this is the way professional historians construct their work product to demonstrate causality and change over time. (See Eksteins, Rites of Spring)