Mike Daisey lied - but that doesn't mean overseas factories should be let off the hook.

The need for the press is crucial. The need for the press to have solid ethical grounds in critical.
But when the message we get from a story is clearly delivered as performance, a memoir, and even a fictionalized account, we give it permission to embellish and to editorialize. I loved Fela, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Serafina -- all theatrical depictions of historical events that educate and command sympathy. I understood these were fiction but also came to feel sympathy for history and the people involved. The thing is, there are degrees... and we need to remember not to let the underlying message get lost. Janet Cooke at the Washington Post got the Pulitzer Prize for a story about crack among children in the Washington D.C. ghetto... turned out she made it all up. Does that mean there were no crack problems among children and poverty in the Washington DC children? Of course, the problem would come to be worse then she ever made up. But she wrote it for the Washington Post and called it journalism.

When Mike Daisey went on This American Life and told his story about misconduct and mistreatment of workers at Chinese Foxconn facilities where iPhones and other popular tech products-- he lied to the producers and researchers about several facts. Bottom line: he is a creative writer. His biggest error was that he allowed his desire for success and good storytelling get in the way of the facts. In his interview Ira Glass asks Mike Daisey why he won't just call his report fiction -- Mike Daisey has a hard time answering this -- and I understand why. Daisey witnessed things that he found to be unacceptable. He says he felt that he had to tell the story when the news had stopped covering it. So it seems the big question remains... does Apple and other American companies using Foxconn look away at worker treatment and standards below American standards when no one is looking? I understand why This American Life as a journalistic entity is embarrassed that they let his embellishments go without checking and I think that their retraction and Mike Daisey's lets them off the hook. However, as journalists perhaps they should pursue the more important message -- there are a lot of lazy standards in American factories and many more oversees -- you just have to get in and look. People like their products and often don't want to know but I think if they did, they'd be appalled and demand change.

Having worked in a salmon cannery for a summer in Alaska in 1995 -- I know all too well that the standards are allowed to slip when the inspectors are gone. I never ate canned salmon again after that, in fact, I don't eat much canned food at all after I saw the way sanitation and safety practices slip when big payloads come in and workers get into the 12th, 13th, 16th, 17th hour of work. That was here in the US. So why in the world would we believe that just because Apple says they've self-inspected the factories and everything's on the up and up would anyone believe it. Let's ask the question -- why aren't the press covering factory conditions in China and anywhere else we're making American products for cheap? Is it a corporate lock-out? Is everyone satisfied by the idea that corporations can be self-policing? I surely am not.