The Agony and the Dishonesty of Mike Daisey’s Apple Story
By now you’ve heard the liar, liar, pants on fire that is Mike Daisey. NewsHour also spoke with him last year. Here’s the interview.
Jeff Brown: You sort of go undercover here to China, to the town - the city, right, of Shenzhen, to a major factory where a lot of these gadgets are made. And you find things, as you tell us, underage workers, people working extensively long hours in bad conditions.
Mike Daisey: Yeah, and I’d like to think I’m not naive. I expected conditions to be hard. We all had a feeling, we don’t know the details, but we know it’s not good in China. But I didn’t expect the widespread almost casual dehumanization of the amount of, really, almost callow brutality.
Turns out, Mike Daisey was lying about certain details about what he actually saw in China. In this weekend’s This American Life, Daisey comes clean to Ira Glass:
“I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”
“I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”
-KC
