Foxconn

How journalism and theater meet, melt and the boarder between reality and fiction is no longer clear.

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"An Actor has responsibility to try to summon up their best self to reflect the truth of the world, that's what an actor does." Mike Daisey said in this Interview

In January 2012 "This American Life" broadcasted the episode 454 called "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory". It was a really successful episode, at first. Mike Daisey is an American monologist, who presented a monologue about Apple and Foxconn, the main factory chain building Apple products in China. Their had been many reactions all over the internet and the monologue was download several thousand times. It was quite negative for Apple's image and supportive for all Apple critics. The entire transcript can be found here, the original episode isn't online anymore.

I first saw a link to that episode in the comments to an article on the German Mac site mactechnews.de. Today, in the tram, I started listening to This American Life and was a bit surprised about Ira's* introduction:

"From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. And I'm coming to you today to say something that I've never had to say on our program. Two months ago, we broadcast a story that we've come to believe is not true. It's a story that got a lot of attention. More people downloaded it than any episode we have ever done."

The Introduction really caught my attention. It came to light that Mike Daisey didn't tell the truth. Parts of his monologue are simply invented and never really happened. At the beginning of the episode 460 called "Retraction" Rob Schmitz is reviewing a fact-check. In the second part Ira Glass directly confronts Mike Daisey with the results of their fact-check. It's really interesting to hear how Mike tries to explain himself and to evade some questions. But before I summarize the whole episode, you should listen to it yourself. The Transcript can be found here.