What's been interesting to me is how the falsehood of the TAL story has resonated with the media. TAL devotes an hour to the retraction rather than the 20 minutes it warranted, producing a sub-standard show, guaranteeing that Mike Daisey will forever be mentioned in the same breath as Stephen Glass. Then the media reaction was overblown, because of the humanity that something was presented as truth turned out to be only half true, or less. In the mean time, efforts to weaken the already-weak Volker rule go nearly unreported. I suspect that this story echoed because the lie was an assault on those with a voice (media) rather than us peons.

It would have been neat if the media coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq had been half as rigorous in "truthiness" as Mike Daisey's theatrical work. Mike Daisey creates interesting theater. The justification for the wars was very poor theater.

Like David Sedaris' work, I don't expect it to be true. Ironically, Sedaris' recounts of personal history are probably more accurate than the lies we are fed about our wars to win "hearts and minds" the world over. The daily lies about America's activities in the world are more insulting than what Daisey did.

"...how Big Lies work... Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration's fictions about Iraq frightened America because they seemed to confirm the nation's worst fears and suspicions"

The surviving Kurds may have something to say about the WMD "fictions" not to mention the thousands in mass graves dispatched the old fashioned way while Israel took out the "fictional" nuclear reactor in Iraq.
Isn't comparing faulty intel believed by Clinton, Bush and a host of intelligence agencies around the world about a true tyrannical butcher like Saddam to the "Protocol" forgeries against an entire religious minority a big lie itself?

Public radio really has become a piece of work and should be taken with not a grain of salt but an entire public funded salt mine.

Setting aside for the moment the question of whether TAL or Ira Glass dropped the ball on the original broadcast, the question that intrigues me is one Mike Daisey raises in his defense: When one sits in the audience of a one-man show, in which the actor appears not as a fictional character but as himself, is there a presumption of truthfulness?

Rather than go back to Spalding Gray or David Sedaris, consider another TAL alum (also named Mike) who has some currency with public radio listeners: comedian Mike Birbiglia. When folks hear his stories in "Sleepwalk With Me" do they assume everything is literally true? What about in the Moth, which (we are always reminded) features "true stories, told live without notes"? I think most people take for granted that those stories are MOSTLY true, but embellished for comic and/or emotional impact. We are not shocked to find that there may be exaggerations, or that events might be told out of sequence, and so forth.

And yet Mike Daisey seems like a different case somehow; lots of people assumed that when he said he saw something, that he actually saw it, and are shocked, SHOCKED to find otherwise. Is it just because of the tone of the piece? Are comedy pieces entitled to a license with the truth that others are not? Would Daisy have been okay if he were just funnier?

Or is it because the subject of a Mike Birbiglia piece is, ultimately, Mr. Birbiglia himself, and we are totally okay with people making up stuff about themselves -- but the subject of Mike Daisey's piece is something OUT THERE, something with real-world, serious ramifications, a matter of ethics and policy and collective moral responsibility, and pieces like that play by a whole 'nother rulebook?

This is really all Hunter S. Thompson's fault. Only he could get away with "gonzo" and all his reader's were in on the art, but many more attempt it and fail. He wasn't kidding when he said "For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled." Or was that Rauol Duke who said that...

I'm a little surprised and dismayed at all the hand-wringing and hair-pulling this week. I listened again to the January TAL episode in which, no kidding, this fellow was introduced as an actor performing a one-man show. Hello? Has everyone forgotten the art of the raconteur?? This guy was performing a stage presentation that was intended to entertain. And Glass states that Daisey became "an amateur journalist" in his investigation. The foreshadowing is right there. THIS AMERICAN LIFE's staff simply didn't let facts (or the absence of corroborated facts) get in the way of a darn good story. And they got caught. They got caught, very very easily.

It's not new, but it's still true -- if something *sounds* too good to be true, it *is*. Daisey's incredible tale of shock and bathos is as engineered as E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL. Of COURSE some of it was massaged and dressed up, just as David Sedaris' tales are. Anyone who believes that THIS AMERICAN LIFE represents pure, undiluted reality needs to wake up -- every week they present great stories, and probably try hard as heck to verify the facts they present. But their primary stock and trade seems to be great stories.

In this week's episode, Glass says he and his staff are "not happy." Cute. I don't think it's enough. They need to go back to basics. Back to journalism 101, in which old reporters said, "If your mother say she loves you, verify it."

Well put, Bob. You've won back a good 95% of the trust I lost in you when I read your Guardian article on the photog who was fired for creating a more perfect reality with Photoshop.

But you left out one of my favorite examples of fictional "non-fiction": Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan series. It's highly likely that the stories were mostly products of his imagination and that the main character was completely made. Brilliant literature, in my opinion (the first books, at least), but fraudulent on their face for being labled non-fiction. These, you may remember, were not just sold to the publisher and the general public as non-fiction, Castaneda also presented them to his academic advisers at UCLA as research in support of the degrees the school awarded him. So this guy committed a twofer: literary fraud as well as academic fraud!

There seems to be a tone, a feeling, that is common to the several public radio comment-threads addressing this story (on NPR.org, here, elsewhere).

The notion is that "This American Life" is beloved by many critically-minded listners, and they like and trust Ira Glass and they have been impressed by his apology and explanation.

They, like Ira Glass and the Marketplace staff, have essentially personalized the blame in this, upon Mike Daisey alone. And as the sole auteur of this fraud, I'd agree that Mike Daisey deserves to be the focus of the inquiry and the shame.

But a re-review of the original January 9 story as it aired on TAL (called "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory") makes me wonder how much wider the inquiry ought to go. There are several important features of the TAL production of the original story as it aired across the country on public radio.

First, it must be noted how hard Daisey and TAL worked, to direct the story against Apple. Foxconn's factories and assembly lines produce all sorts of products, including but not limited to Apple products, and it was not necessary to make Apple the focus. Doing so, was intentional, for effect. It was, for lack of a more subtle term, "political." Mike Daisey, and probably to some extent TAL, wanted to get into the face of Apple because of who and what Apple is.

Second, the orginal TAL story was filled with Ira's intoning all about how the TAL staff spent "weeks" checking Daisey's facts. The TAL webpage for the story states, "Our staff did weeks of fact checking to corroborate Daisey's findings." On air, Ira Glass said, "As for Mike's findings, we have gone through his script and fact checked everything that was checkable." That statement does not lead the general listener to understand that much of the salient facts were denied to TAL. The general listener takes that statement to understand that practically everything checked out to TAL's satisfaction.

Rather than -- or more fairly, IN ADDITION TO -- claiming that Mike Daisey lied, TAL needs to supply a better answer as to how and why Ira Glass declared that they had confirmed "everything that was checkable."

I listened to "American Life" this afternoon and then read this essay. I never expect David Sedaris to be a journalist...he is a humorist and I doubt if he would deny exaggerating the facts in his stories for comedic effect (I believe that's been done for a long time if I correctly recall stories about Samuel Clemens). That's a different class from Mike Daisey who passed his entertainment/personal essay as factual and based on his own experience. What struck me was that it was clear Ira Glass was giving the fellow every opportunity to man up and the guy refused to see what the issue was, and that Mr. Glass was doing more than most would to correct the information and lay out what happened. We have endless lies and misinformation poured out on blogs, social media, political propaganda, extremists on various news stations. At least Mr. Glass showed some integrity and took responsibility. It's easy to throw criticism at him and his staff, but look to some other media darlings and tell me they would have made such an effort to correct a problem or explain the situation so thoroughly.

This is also a good time to review Ira Glass' accptance speech for the 2009 Edward R. Murrow Award:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRlbGiWckEU&feature=fvst

It would be way too easy to pick on the ironic conflation of "Ira Glass" and "Edward R. Murrow" at this time. Instead, note a couple of other things in the video of the speech. Such as Ira Glass' own careful and proper use of the term "public radio." Ira does that, rightly; he doesn't make the mistake of many of his critics, in falsely atrributing all public radio wrongs to "NPR", and he doesn't do what many other public radio defenders do, getting bogged down in the NPR/PRI/APM/Pacifica distinctions. Ira Glass cuts to the chase, in talking about public radio as a single entity.

And indeed, most public radio station listeners aren't called upon to make careful distinctions between Morning Edition (which is an NPR production) and The Takeaway (a WNYC/WGBH production distributed by PRI) and Fresh Air (WHYY production) or Democracy Now! (Produced under the aegis of the Pacifica Foundation and Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan security services... JUST KIDDDING!)

The really interesting thing about Ira Glass' speech is that he presumes a model of public radio apparently in terms similar to his own show. News, and commentary; done in new and exploratory ways perhaps, but still news and commentary. At least I think so; because he never once mentions classical music or opera or jazz or bluegrass, or other arts programming. Indeed, he mentions specifically Terry Gross' doing interviews in which the arts are not the subjects and instead where she is getting into interviews with news figures and authors in the realm of politics and policy.

This is really a core question for public radio. Nationally, and through the big-city stations like WNYC, WGBH and WBEZ; public radio has apparently decided that newstalk and policy and human events will be the featured programming. Not Mozart, Bill Evans and Bill Monroe. Newstalk gets ratings; Mozart, it would seem, does not.

But when NPR tries to do that -- public policy newstalk -- and tries to be as edgey and as experimental as Ira Glass urged in 2009, what you get, at least in part, is the Mike Daisey fiasco.

There is some rich irony, now, in looking back on the OTM "Bias Bias" series from March 2011 in which Ira Glass was leading the charge for public radio's defensibility on charges of a left-leaning political bias.

There are so many different OTM links from that month:

http://www.onthemedia.org/search/?searchtype=site&q=ira+glass&submit=&cx=009801551925401469317%3Arg1pmifjnoa&cof=FORID%3A11

And so many eye-opening quotes. It ought to be revisited. Things like Ira Glass' stern insistence on the fairness and professionalism of NPR news, even as he and Bob Garfield recognized the obvious:

"BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so this gets back to not only Brooke’s problem finding a metric to report on this story, but it’s especially difficult when you and I both know that if you were to somehow poll the political orientation of everybody in the NPR news organization and at all of the member stations, you would find an overwhelmingly progressive, liberal crowd, not uniformly, but overwhelmingly.

IRA GLASS: Journalism, in general, reporters tend to be Democrats and tend to be more liberal than the public as a whole, sure. But that doesn't change what is going out over the air..."

(One small part of the discussion in subsequent weeks turned, innocently, to a mostly benign discussion of a perceived slight in a story with Michele Norris on an All Things Considered story. Less than a year later, Michele Norris is on leave from ATC's daily political coverage, as her husband has taken a full time job with the Obama campaign.)

To this day, the comments thread from this year-old OTM story remains listed as one of OTM's "Most Commented" stories. It is an eye-opening read, in light of recent events:

http://www.onthemedia.org/2011/mar/18/does-npr-have-a-liberal-bias/

Trust? Betrayal? You trust your sources? Not a good idea. Especially if what they say fits into your preconceived sense of the world. That's always when people let their guard down.

Reagan used to go around saying, "Trust, but verify."

Doublespeak! If you trust, there's no need to verify.

If you want to be a journalist, you have to stop trusting people. It's nothing personal. You verify as much as you can, and what you can't, you let people know.

Verification and Transparency. That's what I teach my students.

Look, there IS a story here about he disparity between those factory workers and us. We should ask ourselves what part or how much of what Daisey describes is rendered moot by the factual inaccuracies. I thought Ira was wise to cover that in Act 3 of the show. But, I totally disagree with the writer lumping Sedatis into this discussion. Totally different animal: Sedaris is presenting personal memoir. Anyone who derives pleasure from his stories based on the assumption that those stories are factually accurate is a fool, a prude, or tremendously confused about the difference between humorous writing and reportage.

I have a rule, to which I adhere with diligence and near religious zeal. It is this. Never believe anything you hear on the radio, see on television, read in a newspaper, magazine or other periodical unless you have independent dis-interested third party confirmed and personally witnessed corroboration.
Accepting anything at face value is a fool's errand, regardless of it's source.

Two things come to mind. One is that Ira Glass put on his show a one-man THEATRICAL performance that certainly could never have been seen as journalism of any kind. The fact that the "facts" turn out to be fabrications, should have come as no surprise. Glass and his producers failed to do due diligence before they placed this story on the air. (I also don't think that this rises to a James Frey level of deception but that's by-the-by.)

Another point is that TAL is not a journalistic enterprise, no matter what Glass says. It's an entertainment program, albeit an unusually high quality one. Journalism does occur on the show but it's not the main thing. Thus, when David Sedaris comes on the program, he is doing a shtick about this family life or whatever, not reporting on it. That Sedaris has not appeared on TAL in quite awhile is a testimony to Ira Glass' sudden and misguided attempt to make his how more journalistically while retaining some of the former elements that made TAL an initial success. Well, now hubris has bitten IG in the butt and he should do some serious soul-searching about whether he's really cut out to be a Journalist. That he was "taken-in" in such an obviously transparent way suggests not.

When Ira Glass said "A couple weeks ago I saw this one-man show where this guy did something on stage I thought was really kind of amazing. He took this fact that we all already know, right, this fact that our stuff is made overseas in maybe not the greatest working conditions, and he made the audience actually feel something about that fact. Which is really quite a trick. You really have to know how to tell a story to be able to pull something like that off." I assume that they saw A THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE a la Spaulding Gray in which theatricality, and not fact, is the main attraction. I did not assume that Ira went to some sort of academic or journalist symposium where fact is paramount because Ira did not present Mike Daisy's story that way in his opening.

I am glad you hold your profession to a higher standard of truthfulness and disclosure than Daisey, but I can't help but feel the outrage of Daisey's media critics is disproportionate to his deception. After all, his flawed "reporting" is about real abuses. Perhaps his trangression seems all the more egregious because it runs counter to the far more common failure of journalists to serve as truth-concentrating filters of facts. When the media is so easily manipulated by governments and multinational corporations, and when news consumers aren't all that discriminating between truth and truithiness, is it any wonder an activist artist would want to co-opt the tools of journalism to tell a better story? Daisey and Sedaris are easy targets when there are so many bigger, more effective liars on the media.

To me, the key problem is that a theatrical performance was reproduced nearly verbatim on a news show. Daisy's performance piece did not need to acknowledge he enhanced the facts because the medium itself--a monologue detailing first-person experience, with a highly emotional, direct appeal to the audience from the stage--told us that he probably did. We rely on the meaning of the medium itself to tell us how exacting to be about the facts. This American Life presented theater as news, and therein lies the problem.

We saw Ira Glass...."perform"......."lecture"......"do" whatever it is he does before a live audience last weekend. It would have been a hell of a lot better if he had addressed this issue. I can't imagine this thing came out of absolutely no where to bite him on the butt. There must have been an inkling; a whiff. (This American) Life goes on.

Great piece.

I will just highlight a couple of things I find interesting about the whole situation. This is a week where two huge stories - the Kony video from Invisible Children and Mike Daisey's piece on Apple - flamed out after going hugely viral. The Mike Daisey story was one of the most popular in the history of This American Life, and the Kony video was just the most recent of many that that group has been making for years.

In both cases, the creators could say that they never knew that it was going to be this big. Both exploded and went viral.

Daisey was doing a one-man show when Jobs died and there was an insatiable media appetite for all things Jobs.

It is also comparable to the James Frey "memoir" fiasco with Oprah.

But it also says something really interesting about the audience. We want great stories, and we want to believe them. But the truth is almost always complicated and nuanced, but as something as simple as the telephone game shows, noise always creeps into the signal. Nuanced truth doesn't travel. Good stories do.

The surprising thing is that for people who work in media, or any other industry that involves storytelling, there is technique and editing involved in all of it - overstated cases, inflamed rhetoric, gravitas while saying ridiculous things. That is the weird thing about the Daily Show and Colbert - they parody the news while actually delivering it.

The interesting aspect to me is how badly we as an audience want these things to be true. It shows how trusting we are as humans, but also that we are looking for something authentic. James Frey's book was not originally written as a memoir, but someone in the marketing department said no one wants to read fiction, let's sell it as a memoir instead. Then when people find out it's false, they feel cheated.

Will the fabrications and any retractions be made known in The Guardian, where the article originally appeared?