Economics

Happy iPad Release Day, Apple! A Story about the Horrors of Your Chinese Factories Retracted by This American Life

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As a new iPad 3 launches today, This American Life retracts a very popular story about how awful some of Apple's sourcing factories in China are. From their press release:

This American Life and American Public Media's Marketplace will reveal that a story first broadcast in January on This American Life contained numerous fabrications.

This American Life will devote its entire program this weekend to detailing the errors in the story, which was an excerpt of Mike Daisey's critically acclaimed one-man show, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." In it, Daisey tells how he visited a factory owned by Foxconn that manufactures iPhones and iPads in Shenzhen China. He has performed the monologue in theaters around the country; it's currently at the Public Theater in New York.

Tonight's This American Life program will include a segment from Marketplace's Rob Schmitz, and interviews with Daisey himself….

Marketplace had done a lot of reporting on Foxconn and Apple's supply chain in China in the past, and Schmitz had first-hand knowledge of the issues. He located and interviewed Daisey's Chinese interpreter Li Guifen (who goes by the name Cathy Lee professionally with westerners). She disputed much of what Daisey has been telling theater audiences since 2010 and much of what he said on the radio….

The response to the original episode, "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory," was significant. It quickly became the single most popular podcast in This American Life's history, with 888,000 downloads (typically the number is 750,000) and 206,000 streams to date. After hearing the broadcast, listener Mark Shields started a petition calling for better working conditions for Apple's Chinese workers, and soon delivered almost a quarter-million signatures to Apple….

Daisey's response--sure, what he says shouldn't be construed as journalism:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

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. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret.

A preview of Schmitz's correction/reporting on Daisey's claims here. An example:

Take one example from his monologue—it takes place at a meeting he had with an illegal workers union. He meets a group of workers who've been poisoned by the neurotoxin N-Hexane while working on the iPhone assembly line: "…and all these people have been exposed," he says. "Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them…can't even pick up a glass."

Cathy Lee, Daisey's translator in Shenzhen, was with Daisey at this meeting in Shenzhen. I met her in the exact place she took Daisey—the gates of Foxconn. So I asked her: "Did you meet people who fit this description?"

"No," she said.

"So there was nobody who said they were poisoned by hexane?" I continued.

Lee's answer was the same: "No. Nobody mentioned the Hexane."

I pressed Cathy to confirm other key details that Daisey reported. Did the guards have guns when you came here with Mike Daisey? With each question I got the same answer from Lee. "No," or "This is not true."

I blogged a year ago or so on a weirdly-spun Wired story that also tried to make the Apple facilities seem worse than they are.