Apple, This American Life and a really pissed off Ira Glass

If you haven't listened to this week's This American Life episode, "Retraction", go listen to it. If you can't, at least read the transcript, though you really have to listen to Ira Glass and Mike Daisey to get the full impact.

It's the most gripping radio (or podcast) you'll hear all year, even more so than the original one about working conditions in Chinese factory that produce Apple products.

Few observations:
* Ira Glass is audibly pissed, even though he doesn't raise his voice and he can't speak faster than he normally does.

* Mike Daisey is, to be polite, a piece of shit. He can't get himself to admit that he lied, and he's only sorry that the truth got out, not that he told lies (he almost says as much).

* Though I think he realizes that he does more to harm the cause he claim to care about so much.

* People are willing to believe the worst about China and Apple. I know I was.

* Interesting point by the New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who did the investigative reporting about Chinese factories - Apple and other electronics manufacturers don't choose China for the cheap labor. They choose China for the proximity of the supply chain (it's that theory that got Krugman his Nobel Prize).

* Apple's complicity in the working conditions is kinda complicated. They're the biggest client for these Chinese factories, but they're hardly the only ones.

Even if you stop buying Apple products, you're still going to be using stuff made by Foxconn and other Southern Chinese sweatshops. And they're probably the most proactive and transparent of all US manufacturers about working conditions in China (though the competition there isn't all that great). That said, if they told Chinese factories to get 60+ hour workweeks down to zero, they could get pretty close (and when they have demanded changes, changes have happened).

* There's also the issue of our role as consumers. Even with the suicides and the labor conditions, I think the net result is that life is better for people in Shenzhen because of Apple's investment in the area. But Duhigg lays it out, we as a society decided a long time ago that we don't mistreat workers, yet we're willing to accept what we find unacceptable as long as it's on another continent.

I haven't listened to the retraction yet but I donated money to TAL last week, just based on the straight-up no-bullshit way they issued the retraction.



This also explains something I was wondering about a couple of weeks ago. Terry Gross was interviewed Charles Duhigg a couple of weeks and neither one of them mentioned Mike Daisey when they were talking about his work in China. She even said something about how Dughigg's work had done a lot to raise awareness of the labor issues there.

I remember thinking that it was really, really weird that neither Daisey nor that TAL episode was mentioned, not even in passing.

I'm guessing this is why.

Here's a good summary from Jon Gruber, who, it should be pointed out, is generally pro-Apple on most issues, but not religiously so: http://daringfireball.net/2012/03/baby_from_the_bath_water

The made-up facts don't bother me as much as seeing Daisey pull rhetorical acrobatics to defend himself after he's been exposed.

Christ that was painful. Especially the interview with Mike "You're no" Daisey.

Mike Daisey was dancing around the fact that he made stuff up. The closest he could get was saying that it was the spirit of the segment what was important or his version of reality was different than Ira Glass's version of reality. It happened but he didn;t see it so how true was any of it?

Conversely, kudos to Ira Glass and the staff at This American Life for owning their mistake.

The last segment with Chales Duhigg was very interesting. He pointed out something I used to get into conversations with volunteers in Central America. You can't hold Panamanian/Tico/Nica standards to American standards.*

I wouldn't say that Apple's complicity isn't as complicated. The ending reminded me of Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Apple, like a McDonalds or Wal-Mart, are industry leaders. If they adopt a practice that benefits them in some way, others will follow or at least take a hard look at it.






* This was more of eating rice and beans 3 X a day which volunteers tired of quickly. Or the fact that we had electricity from a generator so TV is out of the question. So we are dealing with 2 very different things in comparison to this story.

I don't disagree with you - Apple has the size and influence to change things, and they probably need to do better.

Then again, they're probably the least worst of the companies that produce in China - I'm not aware of any other corporation that's as thorough in auditing their vendors and holding them accountable, even if their official reports are to be taken with a grain of salt.

I finally got to hear this. Like Barb, I'm especially impressed with the way they issued a retraction. It's impossible to imagine Fox spending ANY time on something that has been shown to be deceptive. For instance, I'm having a hard time seeing much difference between Deasey and James O'Keefe. But I see a huge difference between Ira Glass and Roger Ailes.

There's a similar debate going on in the literary world. Or a small portion of it. A guy named John D'Agata just published a book called "Lifespan of a Fact" that's a collaboration between him and a fact checker. What D'Agata sees as artistic license, his fact checker sees as a distortion or an error. Quoth D'Agata: "It's called art, dickhead."

“If a mirror were a sufficient means of handling human experience,” he writes, “I doubt that our species would have invented literature.”

What's the line between art and fact?

fact-checker Jim Fingal, thinks the line is clear. He spends Lifespan fighting D’Agata about questionable statements both tiny (is the brick at the base of the tower red or brown?) and enormous (did D’Agata, manning a Las Vegas suicide hotline, really talk to the boy, Levi Presley, the night he died?), but D’Agata finds his queries a waste of time. When Fingal challenges D’Agata’s false claim that a quiz Presley took three years before his death was “the last pop quiz he took in school.” D’Agata pushes back nonetheless: “Really, Jim, you’re worrying about very stupid shit.” “Unfortunately,” Fingal responds archly, “I don’t get to decide which facts are stupid. I have to check all of them.”

But D’Agata doesn’t believe he’s playing by those rules. He’s an essayist, not a nonfiction writer, and works in the tradition of greats who, he asserts, also fudged facts for effect. “Mary McCarthy, Orwell, Thoreau, Cicero,” he said, ticking off the examples on his fingers. I’d be more inclined to accept that, maybe, if so many of the changes that Fingal proposes—and D’Agata steadfastly, almost comically, rejects—weren’t simple matters of fact (a distance is 4 miles, not 3; a driver turns left to get to a hotel, not right) that would not, as D’Agata protests, “ruin it.”

And perhaps I’d be more enthusiastic about D’Agata’s right to artistic license if the essay that he defends to his last breath weren’t filled with the kind of portentous magazine writing that can sound insightful and elegant (if occasionally overheated) but that seems utterly hollow when you’re faced with the layers upon layers of falsehoods that went into creating a specific effect. In the book, the argument between D’Agata and Fingal comes to a head when D’Agata writes that Tae Kwon Do—the martial art that Levi Presley studied before his suicide—was invented by an ancient Indian prince. . .

In order to avoid a tl;dr, I'll leave the rest unquoted. If anyone cares, it's here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...nds_his_right_to_fudge_the_truth_.single.html

I'm with The New Yorker here. Let's take a typical "based on a true story," The Blind Side. It's not only a steaming bowl of lies, but the lies are banal and awful and just ick, bad writing. White suburban mom shows up in slut dress in the hood and trash talks a bunch of gangbangers? Uh-huh. Big huge 15 year old kid has never played football before and doesn't know how to line up? Uh-huh. Guy plays his first football game, and a cracker from To Kill a Mockingbird shows up directly behind the parents, and guess what his cracker boy is directly matched up against their kid. Blech.

Let's make true be true and fiction be everything else. OK?

Blue chip tackle goes to Ole Miss? DOUBLE BLECH!

Well I guess that part did happen. FYI, I read when the movie came out how the guy (forgot his name) was annoyed that the film made him appear as if he had never played football before when he joined the high school team.

There is a huge difference to me between something that is a dramatized version of the truth that's put out there for entertainment and something that is purported to be actual first hand reporting of actual incidents and facts.

The standards for truth in the latter should be far more strict than in the former.

Not to me. But I realize that most people would take your side on the matter.

As weaselly as "based on a true story" sounds, it does declare itself a work of fiction (and I trust, trust trust trust that Michael Lewis's reporting in the original is accurate).

And the thing is, even if it was completely fictional, 'Blind Side' works as a Sandra Bullock vehicle (though the Oscar nomination may not have happened).

Also, the problem with Mike Daisey's "dramatic license" is that he doesn't embellish the truth - he twists the truth. He takes things that were already reported by the New York Times and Apple and turns them into something different.

Oh, and apparently, David Sedaris is the go-to reference point for monologists whom everyone knows are lying.

I think the difference is basically the Good Will Hunting BJ joke, when he tells the joke as if he was on the plane personally. When asked if he had ever been on a plane, Damon's character says no, but the joke works a lot better that way. Same thing here. Sedaris' writing in this regard is a collection of anecdotes. I'd be annoyed if they weren't true, but they're there to entertain.

What Daisey did is on another level - it's almost advocacy, which shouldn't twist facts at all.

Ugh. This sort of thing bothers me immensely, because it shows a complete lack of understanding and context. While Thoreau may not have been a overly political figure*, Cicero was entirely one. His "essays" were actually wholly self serving correspondences with Tyro or court speeches for politically motivated trials, which he subsequently edited in publication in order to make himself look better. That's the tradition D'Agata wants to follow? The willful and intentional twisting of history to suit one's own political and publicity needs? Aside from being less than forthright with the truth, Cicero was also a notorious self-promoter, thus his constant harping on the halcyon days of his consulship and his "saving of his country" by unmasking Catilina's plot (which had no hope of success). So yes, let's continue that tradition!



*I find his and Emerson's writing so awful I've tried to forget their entire canon and it's place in history; late 19th/early 20th century northern US prose is a plague upon mankind. ******** Ethan Frome and any Mellville book with a donkey dick. But I digress.

But is there any doubt that Blind Side is fiction? It's states as "based on a true story", but it's CLEARLY not a documentary. Is there a single person that would get confused by this? I do find it's a bit more of a problem with biopics, like A Beautiful Mind's editorial choices and omission of Nash's less salubrious characteristics, even if that also wasn't a documentary. But The Blind Side? Come on.

nice,

Dissing Thoreau and Emerson in the same breath...

I've never neg-repped anyone in my whole tenure on BS, but you're getting me close to the edge, my friend.

Daisey finally offers a genuine mea culpa...

http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/2012/03/some-thoughts-after-storm.html?m=1

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Yeah yeah I concede. I don't concede the related point that Blind Side is more damaging to the American mindset than is the Apple documentary, but that's a different point.

Speaking of writers which make me want put out my eyes with scissors.

I mustn't be a good American because I have no idea what this "Blind Side" thing is that you're upset about.

What did you think about that Oliver Stone movie about the Kennedy assasination?

Well-executed hokum, like The Blind Side. It didn't seem as obviously faked up, though, which I chalk up more as a tribute to Oliver's skills than it is to his insights.

I guess when it boils down to it The Blind Side annoys me for aesthetic reasons rather than for falsifying. If it faked more skillfully I'd be alright with the fakery.

Are we talking about the book _The Blind Side_, which I read, or the movie, which I avoided?

I wasn't aware that Lewis took any liberties in the book, though I did find it disappointing because rather than being a football version of moneyball in which the value of the left tackle is explored (well, that is the book, for maybe 50 pages), it became a feel good book about academic and athletic corruption aided and abetted by upper-class Republican "christians."

I'm not sure how Blind Side is more damaging. It has some elements that make it palpably clear that it's not a documentary. (The idiot coach and Sandra Bullock calling plays, ffs.)

Oh, his longer stuff, absolutely (including quoted book, which I couldn't get through). But, (a) the quote was very apropos, and (b) some of his books, like Great Expectations are not at all bad with a bit of editing.

In the words of Troy McClure, "uhhh, the movie or the planet?" In this case, the book

In my goal to quote Troy, I forgot the point of the post! D'oh. You're right, of course, it was the movie.