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This American Lie

raccoonradio

raccoonradio

Episode retracted after parts fabricated.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout...episode-says-daisey-fabricated-175638428.html

<<The public radio show This American Life has retracted an entire storyline told by comedian and self-described Apple fanboy Mike Daisey that aired in early January after Daisey's translator said he made up significant details of the tale...Translator Cathy Lee told Schmitz that she never saw the underaged or poisoned workers, and that she also never saw armed factory guards, which Daisey describes.
 
All of us who work in media make errors, some of them serious, some of them less so.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone with the stones to own up to an error and offer a full, unconditional retraction, as Glass has done here. No excuses. No weaseling. No deflecting by pointing to bad things someone else may or may not have done. (I have a three-year-old and an eight-year-old; I've heard enough, "But Mom, he did it first" to last a lifetime.) No "I'm sorry I sunk to someone else's bad level." Just: "we got it wrong, we're sorry, and we're pulling the episode."

Oh, and they're devoting an entire episode to the retraction.

There's a lot of false equivalency floating around out there these days. I don't think any of it applies here.

You follow media stories pretty avidly, raccoon, and your criticism of public media on this forum and elsewhere has been consistent and unstinting. So I'm curious, naturally: can you cite any examples from your side of the aisle where a host or a program has owned up to an error this prominently and this unconditionally?
 
BOSTON GLOBE:
http://finance.boston.com/boston/news/read?GUID=20875946

>>In the investigative episode shortly to air, Schmitz confronts Daisey with this information. His response:"I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. 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."
------------------

I'm sure there have also been cases of bias etc on the right; either side can distort by leaving out facts or putting "fake" facts in. The Right as well as the left (and keep in mind when it comes to
social issues, I _am_ on the left) has been taken to task, and bravo to the show for owning up
to it right away. If it's a "news"/doc. show, "dramatic license" doesn't belong there. This isn't
Harry Shearer doing satire on Le Show.

I was listening to a bit of Juan Williams' audiobook Muzzled last night. At one point he said that
the Right is against immigrants. No!, I wanted to say to him, against ILLEGAL immigrants. Big
difference. That was his opinion...and that was mine. I found myself agreeing with him as
he discussed such things as the aftermath of the Giffords shooting. He was all for freedom
of speech except in the case of death threats, etc. Anyway, I wish I could have taken him
to task for that assumption about the Right.

Again, bravo to them for the full hour retraction.

A recent example of owning up to an error by the Right might be Rush's apology re: the Fluke
incident though obviously many feel he didn't go far enough in his apology. (He said he was "illustrating the absurd by being absurd", a phrase that pops up also in Zev Chafets' bio of him, "Rush Limbaugh: An Army Of One"). I'm trying to think of some others, and I'm sure they're out there. But yes, I guess
the American Life one-hour retraction etc. would trump any of them.
 
raccoonradio said:
A recent example of owning up to an error by the Right might be Rush's apology re: the Fluke
incident though obviously many feel he didn't go far enough in his apology.
Click to expand...

C'mon, Bob. Really? You can honestly look at Rush's statement last Monday and, with a straight face, assert that it was "owning up to an error"? The statement that spent more time aiming verbal daggers at "the liberals" by way of "apologizing for having sunk to their level?" The statement that gave every indication of having been carefully crafted by the lawyers to limit any apology to "those two words"?

You really think that statement rises anywhere even close to the same level as what TAL did this week? Honestly?
 
And incidentally - I don't think the ability to offer a meaningful apology is the exclusive province of any one side. You want another example of an exemplary apology? Here's Cal Thomas last month:

http://www.calthomas.com/index.php?news=3485

A clip was played from Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program. It featured her commenting on the subject. I stupidly said before thinking, "I think she's the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception." I then added, "and all the rest of the crowd at MSNBC, too, for that matter."

It didn't matter that far worse things have been said in print and on TV about me. I am not supposed to behave like that. ...

The next morning I felt bad about it, so I called Maddow to apologize. It wasn't one of those meaningless "if I've offended anyone ..." apologies; it was heartfelt.
Click to expand...

Do you see a difference between that and the Limbaugh apology?

I said it before and I'll say it again: I have a lot more faith in the long run in anyone willing to acknowledge and correct their errors than in anyone - journalist, commentator or "entertainer" - who would declare themselves infallible.

(Speaking of which, here's another humdinger of an apology, if you haven't seen it - Harold Camping's admission that he really shouldn't have been trying to predict the end of the world: http://www.familyradio.com/announcement2.html )
 
The lesson for journalists: Never rely on a single source for your story. It cost Dan Rather his job, and now a bit of embarrassment for TAL
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
The lesson for journalists: Never rely on a single source for your story. It cost Dan Rather his job, and now a bit of embarrassment for TAL
Click to expand...

The additional problem is that "TAL," besides its straight journalism pieces, has always used pieces from writers and performance artists that are nominally non-fiction, but may have what David Letterman used to call "writers' embellishment." This mixture is one of the main reasons for the show's success. When it was David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell talking about their personal lives, nobody really cared if they were telling the absolute truth or not and there was no need for fact checking. Daisey's piece instead went into journalistic territory in describing the conditions at the Chinese Apple factories and should've been vetted better than it was by "TAL"'s staff--and Glass admitted it. However, by having the NY Times reporter who did a series on the Apple factories in China as a guest on the same episode, he was still saying that there are things going on at these factories that aren't very good, but that particular incidents in the Daisey piece were not true.
 
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