Mike Daisy and the Truth

The big exposé of Apple's practices at that notorious Foxconn factory in China turns out to have been, at least in some large part, fabricated.

Back in January the radio program This American Life, produced by a public radio station in Chicago, ran an excerpt from a one-man show by Mike Daisey. The full one-man show was known as "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," and it purported to tell the story of Daisey's personal investigation of the way in which iPhones and other iStuffs are manufactured.

The pertinent excerpt that served as an episode of This American Life, titled "Mr Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory," aired in January 6, 2012. It had a huge impact. In podcast form it was downloaded 888,000 times. Heck, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show jumped on board the bandwagon, just ten days after that radio broadcast. [To be clear: Stewart's segment on Foxconn/Apple/China makes no specific reference to Daisey, or to the specific elements in Daisey's story I discuss below.]

Turns out some people were wondering about Daisey's veracity as soon as they heard his tales. One of the wondering ones was Rob Schmitz, the Shanghai-based correspondent for Marketplace, a publication of American Public Media.

Rob Schmitz knew China and knew something about Apple. But he did more than wonder about Daisey, he found and spoke with the Chinese woman who served as Daisey's interpreter on his trip to China. Her name is Li Guifen, although her professional name (when working with westerners) is Cathy Lee.

At any rate, Ms Lee says that some of the key conversations in the monologue, included in the radio excerpt, didn't happen. For example, Daisey claimed to have met and spoken (through his interpreter!) with workers who had been greviously injured by a neurotoxin, N-Hexane, while working on the assembly line.

Schmitz asked her whether she and Daisey had in fact met with workers who met Daisey's description of the injured interviewees. She said simply, No." He followed up, had anybody talked to them about Hexane?  Says that interpreter: "Nobody mentioned the Hexane."

When Daisey was confronted about such matters by Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, he admitted that he had lied to Glass before the broadcast. He has offered various justifications for his lies. In the stage monologue, the original context, they aren't lies he says because that is art. The lies he told to get them on This American Life, persuading Glass that it was all literally true, well, he sounds a bit like Truman Capote who also took liberties with fact in his infamous book, In Cold Blood, which deliberately straddled fiction and non-fiction. But one has to be clear which of those one is doing. The straddling is the problem, not a justification!

Jack Shafer puts it well.

"That would be an ideal subject for a one-man theatrical performance."

From the fact that Daisey stinks one cannot conclude of course that Foxconn, or Apple, are above reproach. Schmitz has been very clear about that. He has been interviewed on this point: Factory Working Conditions.

What Daisey seems to have done is to exaggerate actual problems for dramatic effect.  Let us not sugar coat it: There have been Hexane poisonings in China. And in factories that are part of Apple's supply chain, too. The fact that they weren't at the factory Daisey visited doesn't make them unimportant. Still, it makes his dishonesty, if anything, more culpable than it might have been if it had been made up out of whole cloth. If you're going to expose something because you think in doing so you're making a difference: get it right.

I'll give Schmitz the last word: "From what we know these are rare occurrences in Apple’s supply chain. Life at factories that make Apple products is not all hunky-dory, but the truth is much more complicated than how Daisey’s portrayed the situation."

Water on the Moon: the Linkfarm edition

Yesterday, Friday, two rockets plemmeted into the moon, creating debris plumes that should now give scientists some sense of not just whether, but how much, water there is on that body.

Some relevant links. This is how NASA's PR video on the project portrays it.

The story has gone global.

And here is commentary from The Chicago Sun-Times.

But the actual event seems to have been a disappointment to some would-be observers.

Jon Stewart found in a television news report on the subject his Moment of Zen., for October 8.

I'm not the only one reminded of Robert Heinlein, thank heavens.

Ben Stein Watch: Missing the Point

The inaugural edition of the Chris Faille incarnation of BSW will take a look at this.

As you can see via that link, Ben told his reader in late March that Jim Cramer "appeared earlier this month on 'The Daily Show,' where Mr. Stewart yelled and cursed at him, saying he did not let Americans know just how serious the problems were on Wall Street."

Sorry, Ben, I don't know that. I do know that Cramer appeared on The Daily Show, but it am quite certain that to say that the host, Jon Stewart, "yelled and cursed at him," is an inept summary of the proceedings.

There was one lapse into profanity on Stewart's part, when he said "I understand that you are trying to make finance entertaining, but this is not a f***ing game."

The bleeped adjective there was used not to curse at Cramer, but to modify "game," as in "Wall Street fun and games," or to conjure up an image of Nero fiddling while Rome burns, and to express exasperation. My recall is that Stewart was rather affable, although in a somewhat gnomic fashion. Gee, how could we settle this difference in recall? With clips, perhaps?

Anyway, Ben goes on in the above column to explain that Stewart was angry at Cramer for getting predictions long. Stewart was naive about this because, Ben patiently explains, there is nobody who knows how to make reliable predictions.

There, too, Ben misses the point. By a mile. Actually, Stewart was making two good points and neither of them was simply that Cramer got some calls wrong.

Stewart's points were:

1) "Isn't there a problem selling snake oil as if its vitamin tonic?"

2) There's a difference between predicting how markets will come out -- accurately or not -- on the one hand and manipulating them on the other.

He played clips of a video Cramer made for a website called TheStreet.com, in which Cramer seemed to be bragging about having successfully manipulated prices back when he was running a hedge fund.

That's in the second of the three segments in the site to which I've linked you above.

The bottom line, though, for this edition of BSW: did Ben even watch the same show everyone else was watching?