"This American Life" is retracting its extraordinarily popular segment on iPhone manufacturing in China. A contrite Ira Glass explains his thinking:
We've learned that Mike Daisey's story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We're retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey's acclaimed one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products. The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week's episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory."
Daisey is defending himself by saying "what I do is not journalism." Noreen Malone steps back:
[This American Life], which made its name with charming, small slice-of-life tales has gotten increasingly ambitious in recent years, and has begun running a number of successful investigative pieces alongside its bread-and-butter stuff from people like David Sedaris, who has a famously slippery notion of truth himself. It's hard to imagine this misstep, however public and embarrassing, halting that trajectory — but it's also hard to imagine there's not going to be a heightened awareness of the degree of difficulty in creating a product that might play with the idea of truth in one segment and seek to expose it in the next.
Previous Dish on Daisey and Apple here.
The Dish 