This American Life is probably my favorite podcast/radio show and I look to Ira Glass and his team for my weekly fix of stories ranging from the mortgage crisis in the States to software patent trolling. Naturally, I quite liked the story they aired in January titled ’Mr Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory’. They aired an excerpt from Mike Daisey’s immensely popular and emotional(ly manipulative) monologue, ‘The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs‘ which detailed, among other things, the exploitation of underage workers in China.

This week, Ira Glass aired a truly spectacular episode called ‘Retraction‘ calling out Mike Daisey for fabricating key parts of his monologue, including powerful moments like Daisey’s meeting with child-laborers and an old man whose hands were allegedly disfigured by the chemical, n-hexane (used for cleaning glass screens on the production line). It was particularly uncomfortable listening to Mike Daisey squirm while trying to answer Ira’s questions and came across as someone who relies on obfuscation and half-truths to tell a good story and pass it off as fact.

Forget James Frey, I think a better comparison to Mike Daisey’s predicament would be Johann Hari’s troubles. In late 2001, it came to light that Johann Hari had fabricated elements and interviews in many of his stories. His excuse:

When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.

Both Daisey and Hari seem to believe that they fabricated elements of their stories in service of what they thought was a higher cause and frankly, that seems more ethically ambiguous than downright evil (I’ve clearly glossed over the fact they are/were media hogs who profited from their ‘stories’).

Nonetheless, I am in awe of Ira Glass for the retraction. It’s not everyday you come across someone in the media who holds themselves to high standards. If only others in the media were willing to follow this example of intellectual honesty instead of superimposing fact and fiction to elicit some sort of an emotional response. Like someone once said, ‘facts are stubborn things’ but they aren’t optional.