Undermining a devastating and widely publicized critique of Apple’s (AAPL) labor practices, a prominent public radio show said Friday that performance artist Mike Daisey fabricated significant portions of his purported eyewitness account of sweatshop conditions at an Apple supplier in China.
The show “This American Life,” hosted by Ira Glass, said it will devote its entire program this weekend to detailing errors it uncovered in Daisey’s tales of underage workers, horrific workplace injuries and repressive conditions. Those accounts formed the basis of his acclaimed one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which was performed at the Berkeley Rep last year and is now playing in New York. Daisey has also told his story to numerous journalistic outlets, including this newspaper and, more recently, “This American Life.”
In an interview with “This American Life,” Daisey admitted lying about his experiences in China. But he defended himself Friday on his blog, saying he is a storyteller, not a journalist.
Other investigations of Apple’s Chinese supplier, Foxconn, including a detailed account in the New York Times, have raised questions about conditions there. But few of the other efforts packed the emotional punch of Daisey’s work.
Daisey had claimed his account of conditions at Foxconn was based on a six-day visit to the Chinese city of Shenzhen. But the radio show said his story about meeting underage workers at Foxconn, which manufactures electronic devices for Apple and other tech companies, including Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), was untrue.
The program says Daisey also lied about meeting a man who mangled his hand making iPads and encountering a group of workers who said they were poisoned on an iPhone assembly line by a chemical called n-hexane.
“We’re horrified to have let something like this onto public radio,” Glass wrote in a blog post. “Many dedicated reporters and editors — our friends and colleagues — have worked for years to build the reputation for accuracy and integrity that the journalism on public radio enjoys. It’s trusted by so many people for good reason. Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards.”
Daisey, in his blog post, said he stood by his 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,” he wrote. “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.”
Daisey’s tale began to unravel after Rob Schmitz, China bureau chief for Marketplace/American Public Media, listened to the program and immediately picked up on inaccuracies, such as Daisey’s account that factory guards carried guns.
“The only people who are allowed to have guns in China are the military and police,” Schmitz said in a phone interview from Shanghai. He also doubted Daisey’s contention that he met factory workers in a Starbucks, a pricey venue assembly workers would never visit, Schmitz added.
Daisey’s story “took all the extreme examples we’ve reported on in China in a 10-year-period and said he saw all of them in a six-day period,” Schmitz said. “Either it’s incredible or it’s just not true.”
He then tracked down Daisey’s interpreter, Li Guifen, who also goes by the name Cathy Lee, who denied Daisey’s version of encounters with underage and badly injured workers.
When confronted by Schmitz about the discrepancies, Daisey told the reporter, “Look. 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.”
Daisey’s stage performance has drawn positive notices.
A Mercury News review of the Berkeley performance published in January 2011, said: “A wisecracking cross between Michael Moore and Spalding Gray, the rubber-faced performer fuses the high-voltage nerviness of stand-up with a muckraker’s sense of gonzo journalism in his latest one-man show.”
The episode, “Mr. Dai-sey and the Apple Factory,” broadcast by “This American Life” on Jan. 6, was the most popular podcast in the program’s history, and inspired a listener to start a petition demanding better working conditions for Foxconn workers.
Tom Warhover, chairman of the print and news faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, said this is an example of “food-chain” reporting. “Because one organization says it must be so, then others don’t do due diligence,” he said. “It’s a hard thing to fight,” particularly as news organizations face dwindling resources and less time to double-check sources.
Apple, which had no comment on the radio program’s retraction, has come under increasing criticism for the factory conditions of Chinese workers assembling its products. In a January report about its supply-chain partners in Asia, Apple said it found examples of contractors employing children and forcing employees to work exceedingly long hours.
Apple hired the nonprofit Fair Labor Association to perform on-the-ground inspections of Foxconn, which employs more than 1 million workers in China. Foxconn also came under pressure after a number of employee suicides in 2010 and a plant explosion that killed four workers last year.
Contact John Boudreau at 408-278-3496. Follow him at Twitter.com/svwriter.
“This American Life”
The Public Radio International show “This American Life” is retracting an earlier episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” originally broadcast Jan. 6.
“This American Life” will air at noon and 9 p.m. Saturday on KQED radio. The show will also be available as an Web stream at www.thisamericanlife.org/listen.
Rob Schmitz, China bureau chief for Marketplace/American Public Media, details his investigation that led to the retraction in his report at www.marketplace.org/topics/life/ieconomy/acclaimed-apple-critic-made-details.
