Telling the Truth
17/03/12 03:47
I am a fan of Apple Computer. I do not own any Apple Stock, but I have owned a series of Macintosh computers. We started out with a used Macintosh Plus. We had all of our programs on either 400K or 800K floppies. Later we added a Bernouli drive that had the capacity to store an amazing 20 megabytes of data on each cartridge. It was all very expensive. In those days I worked for The Kuna-Melba News and the Meridian Weekly Newspaper and our office bought a Macintosh 512k, a Macintosh Plus and an Apple Laser Printer. The cost for those computers was $10,000. My computer at home earned its own way, printing the mailing labels for the newspapers. I would load up the labels on a dot-matrix printer and start printing when I went to bed. If I was lucky and nothing jammed, the labels would print in about 2 hours. Some nights when I got up to check the printer, I had to start all over again.
We’ve had a strong of Macintosh computers since, including three different laptops. The MacBook Pro that I have been using since 2007 belongs to the church. By way of comparison, its internal hard drive holds 500 gigabytes of information.
I use an iphone4 and was one of the first in our community to get the device. I had pre-ordered it and it arrived on the release date.
I like the company, but I know that no company is perfect. I have read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I understand that he was a complex human being. Perhaps he had qualities that are accurately described as genius, but he also had quirks that could be described as annoying. The company he founded is amazing and their products are also amazing. But I know that I could never have worked with a boss like Steve. I know that the amazing company and amazing products came at a high price in human terms.
I am also a fan of Public Radio. I listen to the radio as I drive around town and there used to be a list of programs that I tried to catch as often as I could. These days, I listen to my favorite programs on podcasts. I have my computer set to download the programs and I listen to them on my own schedule. I usually am listening as I do yard work or work in my garage. I’ve listened to every program of This American Life that has been broadcast. I caught up a couple of years ago when South Dakota Public Radio gave a flash drive filled with the program archives as a premium for a fund drive donation.
So I listened carefully in January when This American Life broadcast a program titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The show contained an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one-man show, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” It detailed conditions in the Foxconn factory in China where many of Apple’s products are manufactured. It did not paint a pretty picture. The show got a lot of attention. There were online petition drives calling for Apple to change the conditions in the factory. Apple launched its own independent investigation and posted a new section on its website detailing workers’ conditions and its investigation. The show took some of the luster out of the company for me.
Like hundreds of thousands of others, I had grown to trust This American Life as a source for honest journalism. It didn’t occur to me that the information they were broadcasting might not be accurate. But that indeed was the fact. The program contained factual errors. And using the word “error” is a bit of kindness. The Mike Daisey monologue contained fictional elements that got by the fact checkers for the radio program.
Today’s episode of the show will be entirely devoted to broadcasting the details of the errors in the show. The number of factories Daisey visited in China is inaccurate. He claimed to have met a group of workers injured by the chemical n-hexane on an Apple assembly line, but those workers were nearly a thousand miles from the city Daisey visited. His stories of meeting with underage workers and with a man whose hand was mangled by repetitive motion injuries are also fabricated.
Daisey’s web site has a couple of paragraphs commenting on the errors in the show. He says, “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.” He doesn’t regret that he made up characters and told the story as if he had actually interviewed them. He regrets that his stories were told on the radio.
Ira Glass, host of This American Life, posted a blog on the show’s web site that “Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Redd during the fact-checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast.”
I’ll say this much for Glass and This American Life. Their pulling of the show and their courage in running a show today examining their mistakes and what was wrong with the original broadcast has earned them my respect. Most radio journalists, when confronted with mistakes or untruths in their broadcasts, tend to defend themselves and pile lie upon lie. We’ve come to expect bias and untruths from the broadcast industry.
All of this does not confirm “sainthood” on Apple. The company has not been perfect. Workers have been injured in Foxconn factories. Working conditions are not as good as they should be. Apple continues to outsource production to China and Taiwan on a huge scale. The New York Times ran a series of articles on Apple’s working practices and production methods and the Times continues to stand by its articles. Apple did hire an independent third-party company to conduct a full audit of working conditions in factories that produce its products. The company would never have done that if there weren’t problems for workers.
But people are never served by a lie. Passing fiction off as if it were the truth is deception. Claiming that information was the result of interviews when in fact it was a fabrication is what the Bible calls “false witness.”
I won’t be buying any tickets for Mike Daisey shows. But I will continue to listen to This American Life. I salute Ira Glass and the shows other producers for taking the time to bring out the truth.
We’ve had a strong of Macintosh computers since, including three different laptops. The MacBook Pro that I have been using since 2007 belongs to the church. By way of comparison, its internal hard drive holds 500 gigabytes of information.
I use an iphone4 and was one of the first in our community to get the device. I had pre-ordered it and it arrived on the release date.
I like the company, but I know that no company is perfect. I have read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I understand that he was a complex human being. Perhaps he had qualities that are accurately described as genius, but he also had quirks that could be described as annoying. The company he founded is amazing and their products are also amazing. But I know that I could never have worked with a boss like Steve. I know that the amazing company and amazing products came at a high price in human terms.
So I listened carefully in January when This American Life broadcast a program titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The show contained an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one-man show, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” It detailed conditions in the Foxconn factory in China where many of Apple’s products are manufactured. It did not paint a pretty picture. The show got a lot of attention. There were online petition drives calling for Apple to change the conditions in the factory. Apple launched its own independent investigation and posted a new section on its website detailing workers’ conditions and its investigation. The show took some of the luster out of the company for me.
Today’s episode of the show will be entirely devoted to broadcasting the details of the errors in the show. The number of factories Daisey visited in China is inaccurate. He claimed to have met a group of workers injured by the chemical n-hexane on an Apple assembly line, but those workers were nearly a thousand miles from the city Daisey visited. His stories of meeting with underage workers and with a man whose hand was mangled by repetitive motion injuries are also fabricated.
Daisey’s web site has a couple of paragraphs commenting on the errors in the show. He says, “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.” He doesn’t regret that he made up characters and told the story as if he had actually interviewed them. He regrets that his stories were told on the radio.
Ira Glass, host of This American Life, posted a blog on the show’s web site that “Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Redd during the fact-checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast.”
I’ll say this much for Glass and This American Life. Their pulling of the show and their courage in running a show today examining their mistakes and what was wrong with the original broadcast has earned them my respect. Most radio journalists, when confronted with mistakes or untruths in their broadcasts, tend to defend themselves and pile lie upon lie. We’ve come to expect bias and untruths from the broadcast industry.
But people are never served by a lie. Passing fiction off as if it were the truth is deception. Claiming that information was the result of interviews when in fact it was a fabrication is what the Bible calls “false witness.”
I won’t be buying any tickets for Mike Daisey shows. But I will continue to listen to This American Life. I salute Ira Glass and the shows other producers for taking the time to bring out the truth.