This American Life: Reopening the nonsensical debate about what a fact is.

Last January, the Public Radio International show This American Life broadcast a program on the harsh treatment of workers in Chinese factories that produce iPhones and other Apple products. The show, called Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, was an excerpt from a theatrical production by Mike Daisey called “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” On Friday, This American Life, and its host, Ira Glass, devoted an entire show to broadcasting an extraordinary retraction, in which Glass said that Daisey had lied to him, and that “the most powerful and memorable moments in the story all seem to be fabricated.”

This has happened before. The Glass retraction was eerily similar to what happened when Oprah Winfrey, in 2006, demanded an embarrassing, face-to-face retraction from James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces, which was promoted as a memoir but turned out to contain numerous fabrications. Winfrey had promoted Frey in her book club, just as Glass promoted Daisey on his show. Winfrey’s and Glass’s interviews with the perpetrators both reeked of the same cringe-inducing ickiness, at least as bad as anything from Larry David, the King of Cringe, on Curb Your Enthusiasm (which, despite its superficial similarity to a memoir, does not purport to be a record of actual events).

The Daisey show was the most downloaded podcast in the show’s history, presumably in large part because of moments like this: A man with a mangled hand was said to have been injured at Foxconn (an Apple supplier) making iPads. Daisey’s iPad was the said to be the first one he ever saw in operation. Daisey says in his monologue:

He’s never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen, and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view, and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand, and the icons slide back and forth. And he says something to Cathy, and Cathy says, “he says it’s a kind of magic.” [Cathy was said to be Daisey’s Chinese translator.]

Glass and the staff wanted to corroborate the facts with Cathy, the translator. Daisey said her real name was Anna and that he had no way to reach her–that she had stopped answering her cell phone. “At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” Glass said. But they didn’t. After determining that Cathy was the translator’s real name, the staff found her. The above incident never happened, she said.

I have something I want to say about the issues raised by this story and its retraction. But first, if you’d like to get more deeply into the story, the retraction, and the commentary both have spawned, here are the links: You can find the retraction, the transcript, and the press release here. The transcript of the original show in January is here, (the audio has been removed). The environment writer Keith Kloor has collected links to much of the commentary on his blog, Collide-a-Scape, in a post entitled The Seduction of Narrative.

Now, to my point. Daisey submitted to an excruciating interview by Glass, which was cringeworthy not only for Daisey’s stumbling, awkward answers, but for Glass’s blistering of Daisey in an apparent effort to cleanse himself and the program of this stain. Yes, Glass admitted that the error was his, but the program seemed determined to at least partly exculpate Glass by showing how this happened, and by making a point of how he was devoting an entire program to the retraction. Glass knocked Daisey down, but wouldn’t stop kicking him. It was embarrassing.

On the other hand, Daisey doesn’t win any sympathy from me. He deserved what he got, and worse. And here’s the most important point in this entire episode, the thing I want to focus on. In the interview, he says this:

Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that
when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.

This is the point, and it’s come up before: What is truth? What is a fact? Can fiction be “true”? Are fabrications permitted in pursuit of a “larger truth”?

A fact–I’m sorry to have to point out to literary theorists, memoirists, actors, directors, post-modernists, and, most importantly, writers, including Daisey and Frey–is a fact.

This is not complicated. Facts are things that have been shown to be true. Yes, fiction can present its own kind of truth; we can all learn some truths about America from Moby Dick. But Melville did not claim to have met Ahab, nor that his great novel actually happened. It draws its strength from its characters and the extraordinary writing.

Yes, truth can be elusive. Yes, some things we would like to be facts are difficult to verify, and therefore do not become facts. But facts are facts. They are part of what separates journalism from fiction. The power in what journalists write comes partly from the characters and the writing, but also from the reader’s understanding that what we are writing about really happened. A fictional account of mistreatment of workers in Chinese factories might make a good tale, but how much more powerful it becomes when we are told that all of what we’re hearing actually happened. The poignancy of the story about the man with the mangled hand dissipates when we learn that the episode was fabricated. When we think it is true, we empathize with this figure, this Chinese man we will never meet, and wonder about the effects of his injury on his livelihood, his spirt, and his family. When we are told that he was made up, all of that goes away. Actors and writers have good cause to make things up and tell us they are true, because we’re more likely to pay attention. That’s why this kind of thing happens.

Yet the notion persists that a “larger truth” justifies fabrication. Note the following comment on Andrew Revkin‘s Dot Earth blog at The New York Times. You can read the entire comment here, but I’ll excerpt a bit of it. The commenter identifies himself as Seth Duerr, artistic director of The York Shakespeare Company in New York:

It is not the responsibility of an actor or playwright to be factually accurate. Journalistic standards do not apply to theater; almost no play would be left standing. Are plays now to be fact-checked and playwrights treated as journalists? Shall we exhume Shakespeare’s corpse, reanimate him and hold him accountable for how he misrepresented real-life figures? Facts: Julius Caesar wasn’t half-deaf, Macbeth never conversed with witches and Richard III wasn’t a hunchback.