Poetic License Run Amok

Back in January, I along with millions of other This American Life fans were fooled by a story on the show called "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory." So important did I consider the story that I posted it on this blog, resulting in a bit of the egg on This American Life host Ira Glass's face finding its way to mine.

Mr. (Mike) Daisey wrote the story as a monologue documenting his recent trip to China to observe working conditions at mega-factories like Foxconn in Shenzhen, a city in south China's Guangdong province. While it is indeed true that the working conditions at Foxconn are appauling, Daisey's monologue about them was presented as a work of journalism, when he had actually played quite fast and loose with the facts. Daisey, who has since admitted that there were serious factual errors in his monologue, claims that he never tried to pass the piece off as journalism. Could he have possibly confused This American Life with Dancing With the Stars? Or did Fox News so numb him to journalistic chicanery that it would never dawn on him to come clean?

If you happened to follow my link to this story, which I entered in this blog when it was first broadcast, please help relieve my conscience by following the link below to Ira Glass's retraction: