I know it can be difficult sometimes to click on a 15-minute video, but this TEDTalk is both timely and worth it — timely because Apple held its iPhone 5 unveiling yesterday in San Francisco, and worth it because Leslie T. Chang is awesome. She’s best known for Factory Girls, by far the best book I’ve encountered about the people — the actual people — who live and work in the factories that churn out much of the world’s retail goods. During the peak of the Mike Daisey debacle, I kept waiting for Chang to pop up in an article or an op-ed page to bury Daisey, but now I realize that she never should deign to address such a lesser work. (CORRECTION: She did write something; see also: Daisey’s response in comments.)

Be sure to catch the Q-and-A at the end of this. Here’s a quick excerpt from the early parts: “By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals on the other end into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone. Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world. In the ongoing debate about globalization, what’s been missing is the voices of the workers themselves. Here are a few…” Youku video for those in China in the morning, when the censors wake up and get around to approving this after the jump.

Via Amazon (h/t E)

And boy do they land some hard blows. After the jump, excerpts from Evan Osnos, James Fallows, Craig Silverman, Ira Glass and David Carr.

I apologize in advance for the length of these excerpts — I usually make a point to keep these short so as to give readers motivation to click on the links and reward the authors with a page hit. On this topic, though, I trust you’re likely to click through anyway.

Evan Osnos, New Yorker:

But Daisey lied. He made up things about his trip, and the show’s attempts at fact-checking failed to uncover them. It all fell apart when Rob Schmitz, a seasoned reporter who is the China correspondent for the public-radio program ‘Marketplace,’ got suspicious and tracked down the translator who’d worked with Daisey. It’s worth a listen, but, in short, Schmitz discovers that Daisey made up scenes, never took notes, conflated workers, never visited a dorm room, and so on. Watching it unravel from Beijing makes me wonder: What does the debacle say about how we all look at China? Why were so many people so eager to believe it?

…Daisey’s undoing was that he turned out to be naïve in a way that he didn’t understand. He thought that China was so exotic and far away that it was uncheckable; that it was okay to take “a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” as he put it in his follow-up interview. (That’s a cliché too, of course, borrowed from every fabulist since Janet Cooke.)

But China, it turns out, is not so far away. Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that China is essentially unknowable, that reporters never go to factory gates, that highways exit to nowhere. And he might have gotten away with it twenty years ago. But these days, it’s no longer so far away at all. It’s close enough to make an iPhone today and have it on a U.S. store shelf next week. And it’s closer in another important way as well—in overestimating his own ability, Daisey underestimated a lot of other people. He didn’t realize that podcasts are often followed by listeners with real knowledge on his subject: American expats who probably rely even more on podcasts than other people because it’s so difficult to get books and magazines and radio stories over here.

James Fallows, The Atlantic:

When I heard Daisey’s Shenzhen riff on C-Span late last year, I wrote to a longtime friend who is also a friend and supporter of Daisey’s and had been trying to get us together. I said: This doesn’t sound right. I also said that I was bleakly amused by Daisey’s presenting the far-off exotic territory of “Shenzhen, China” as some super-secretive realm that he alone had thought to unveil. I pointed out that I had done a gigantic cover story and on-line slide show about this unknown land back in 2007, plus later in a book and a video series; that the Wall Street Journal had done hundreds of stories with Shenzhen datelines before and since; that there had been countless books, picture shows, news features, etc, about the Shenzhen phenomenon; that “Foxconn” was hardly an unknown enterprise; etc.

…4) Go read that This American Life transcript again. It is superb in its unraveling of Daisey’s inventions; in its exploration and explanation of “real” journalistic values and the difference between fact and metaphor; and in its ending with a re-introduction of the real problems of workplace safety in China. It is full of passages like this, between Daisey and Ira Glass, after Glass has pointed out that some of Daisey’s monologue flat isn’t true:

Mike Daisey: Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important.
Ira Glass: I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says ‘this happened to me,’ I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labeled as ‘here’s a work of fiction.’

“I feel like I have the normal worldview” is a line that will live, or deserves to.

Ira Glass talking to Mike Daisey, This American Life (rush transcript of the retraction… start on the bottom of page 13 for the Daisey interview):

Ira Glass: I guess I thought that you were going to come in and say that more if it wasn’t true because, um, there are parts of it I just don’t buy based on what you’ve said. I don’t believe you when it comes to the underage worker. Like, it seems credible that your translator if she saw an underage worker, it seems credible that she says that she would remember that kind of thing because it’d be so unusual. That seems credible. And I don’t believe you when it comes to the guy with the twisted hand because your translator who was there doesn’t remember that he said he worked for Foxconn and doesn’t remember the incident with the iPad. And I might be more inclined to believe you but you admit to lying about so many little things – the number of people who you spoke to, the number of factories that you visited – you admit to making up an entire group of characters who didn’t exist, who were poisoned by hexane and the only person who was with you said these things didn’t happen. So when it comes to underage workers and the man with the claw-hand it’s like – I don’t believe that that happened.

Mike Daisey: All I can tell you is that I stand by what I told you before – that I stand by those things.

Ira Glass: That those things happened – those specific things.

Mike Daisey: Yes. And I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

Craig Silverman, Poynter:

Liars eventually believe their story is true.

Emboldened by the “This American Life” broadcast and his newfound attention, Daisey began to embody the character he’d created: a trustworthy crusader with the moral and factual authority to comment on Apple and media coverage of the company.

Nothing represents this misrepresentation better than Daisey’s recent blog post, “David Pogue is only competent to review gadgets.” That post rocketed around the Web, getting linked and tweeted by many journalists.

Sitting high on his stallion, Daisey gave a recent article by The New York Times writer a thorough Fisking. It was a devastating critique of the way Pogue covered Apple’s reaction to concerns about conditions at its overseas suppliers, and Daisey made valid points.

But with Daisey exposed as a liar, the valid parts of the critique lose their impact. The sections of the blog post that question Pogue’s work and integrity are now laughable coming from Daisey…

…Having lied to “This American Life” in order to have his work appear in a journalistic framework that added credibility and brought him and his cause greater attention, Daisey still felt qualified to question someone else’s ethics and qualifications.

David Carr, New York Times:

Is it O.K. to lie on the way to telling a greater truth? The short answer is also the right one.

No.

…I’m more concerned about the suggestion that you have to cheat to come up with remarkable journalism that tilts the rink. As it happens, Charles Duhigg, David Barboza and Keith Bradsher, reporters who work at The New York Times, spent a great deal of time last year investigating Apple’s suppliers and published a series in January that may have contained a bit less drama, but landed hard. Apple subsequently announced an audit of its Chinese supply chain by an independent group.

Finally… while my opinions hardly merit inclusion with the above, I’d like to append a quick thought to yesterday‘s post:

Mike Daisey has built a career out of storytelling, so he should know, better than anyone, that the best type of fiction is set in reality, which is necessarily complicated. His reality of China, however, is an oversimplified and gelded one in which Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan live. People are props, like the man with the mangled hands, and as such, we lose more than a little of both the spirit and the reality of real-life stories of struggle and perseverance, triumph and failure, those many stories that populate this country and every other. Here’s the part about Daisey’s defense that I think offends me the most: asked why he didn’t let This American Life’s fact-checkers interview his translator, he replies, “Well I did think it would unpack the complexities of” how the story gets told. You understand, that’s just his flimsy justification to himself; what he means is: he didn’t want other people to realize he had crafted a story beset with purple prose and broad strokes — a flunking one, if he were an MFA student — which could only be concealed and excused if the story were true. Mike Daisey has made a mockery of both reality and fiction.

Astrid Riecken / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Picture via Mark Gimein’s post at Bloomberg Businessweek in which he essentially retracts his original review: “Usually, ‘art’ is art and ‘journalism’ is journalism. When the two meet, it’s rarely on the same stage. An exception is the work of monologuist Mike Daisey.”

Mike Daisey is not a China expert. This should be abundantly clear, because he tells you himself in his monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs:

I am telling you that I do not speak Mandarin, I do not speak Cantonese, I have only a passing familiarity with Chinese culture and to call what I have a passing familiarity is an insult to Chinese culture—I don’t know fuck-all about Chinese culture.

This is performance art, and as such, it’s a pretty entertaining way of saying he is not a China expert. Got it. Unfortunately, he says in his very next breath:

But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were fourteen years old, I met workers who were thirteen years old, I met workers who were twelve.

Do you know, really?

We can excuse the man for not knowing China. But now that it’s clear he fabricated parts of his show, I wonder whether the public will be so forgiving of his mischaracterizations of the place. His monologue, as I reread it, is neither journalism nor art. It’s polemics. Daisey uses theater not to promote a cause or illuminate a greater truth, but to drive a narrative and sell tickets. And by the sheer weight of his charisma and his stage, he has obfuscated — deliberately or not — the real issues on the ground, all the while offering no solutions to the complexities of global economics, poverty, and China’s urban migration.

And frankly, a lot of his scenes are just plain bad:

And I say, “Great. Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to call all of the factories you have connections with, I want you to call them, and I want you to tell them that I am an American businessman, and that I want to buy whatever they are selling.

And she listens to this, and she says, “But you…are not a businessman?”

And I say, “That’s true, I am not a businessman.”

And she says, “And you…aren’t going to buy their products?”

And I say, “That’s true. I am not going to buy their products.”

She says, “You…will lie to them.”

And I say, “Yes, Cathy. I’m going to lie to lots of people.”

And for a moment, I think it isn’t going to work.

And then you can actually see the idea leap the synaptic gap from a Problem to a Problem-To-Be-Solved.

She says:

<<very slowly, carefully, clearly, and quietly>>

“You…are going to need a lot…of business cards.”

No, she did not say that very slowly, carefully, clearly, and quietly. She plainly did not do that, and yes, I’m telling you this as someone who does possess a passing familiarity with Chinese culture. That’s not how Chinese people speak.

Aesthetics aside, lying about what one sees and putting real faces to fake stories has consequences, and for Daisey to remain unremorseful in light of recent findings of manipulation and embellishment is to be intentionally daft in the hope that “art” will serve as bulwark against backlash. It won’t, because willfully or not, he packaged his story as journalism (willfully, I think), and as a result duped a whole lot of people.

When reasonable and intelligent critics tried to point out his mistakes, he told them off, like this:

As a fellow raconteur it’s painful to have to confront Mr. Fry with this fact, but he’s being a total idiot.

And this:

DAVID POGUE IS ONLY COMPETENT TO REVIEW GADGETS

And only now, in light of Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz’s fact-checking and This American Life’s very public retraction of its story about him, does he explicitly admit, “My show is a theatrical piece…”

Why didn’t we hear him say it before?  As Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici points out:

Anyone who’s surprised by Daisey’s utter lack of remorse or true introspection is unfamiliar with the works of other fabulists James Frey and Johann Hari. “I never meant my work to be taken as literal truth” is always the first line of defense for writers who see themselves as creative geniuses but end up finding success as purveyors of boring non-fiction.

The fact is, Foxconn pays relatively higher wages than other factories in Shenzhen, and it’s one of the more desirable jobs for many people. I’m not saying that makes it a particularly fun place to work. It offers nothing you or I would do, because we’re spoiled and we’re lucky as hell. But the reality is, for a lot of Foxconn’s employees, it is the right place for them at this current time, offering chances for promotions and the possibility of a previously unknown prosperity. As I wrote on Heart of Beijing in response to This American Life’s original story on Daisey in a post titled, “Because we dislike Foxconn, should we relieve 900,000 people of their jobs?”:

Unfortunately, the world is the way it is. It’s not the way bleeding hearts want it, and for that, we should all be sorry, we really should, but — at the risk of repeating myself — the world is the way it is, so that a 12-year-old child of an Anhui farmer who works 18 hours a day on the paddies might choose to seek employment in the big city to make four times as much as her parents at a company that draws the ire of the developed world. And what has the developed world ever given her? Never mind that American politicians don’t give a shit about her, they only complain about their own country’s jobs and the dollar-yuan exchange rate. That girl has a great story, and I applaud Mike Daisey for getting it and the hundred-plus other stories from Foxconn. I just fear that the China Narrative being the way it is — much like the world is the way it is — people will see the girl as merely a symbol of a “Communist regime.”

I quoted Evan Osnos:

iPhone suicides, believe it or not, are not news to the Chinese. Nobody has done more aggressive reporting on the factory conditions at Foxconn than the Chinese press. Before foreigners noticed, newspapers in eastern and southern China were investigating the deaths of workers and Chinese bloggers were documenting more details about their daily lives than foreign visitors could hope to obtain. It’s one of those examples of how erratic the Chinese world of information is these days: the Chinese press is throttled on many issues, but when it concerns workplace conditions — or, better yet, a factory with a boss in Taiwan — the issue resonates with enough notes from old socialist hymns that it gets reported in astonishing detail.

A lot of people are doing real work on this subject, trying their best to represent a complicated reality. Meanwhile, Daisey is saying 12-year-olds build iPhones… and saying that accomplishes what, exactly? Get Americans to boycott the product, and then 12-year-olds in China will lead a happier existence?

Mike Daisey does not understand the situation because he doesn’t care to. At the risk of being wrong, I’ll go ahead and say that I believe Daisey feigns righteous anger to move the needle and that he’s known all along how much easier it is to entertain than to practice accountability. But whoever thought he’d be proud of that? “What I do is not journalism,” he writes on his site. “The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.”

I’ll leave you with the Guardian‘s Bob Garfield:

Which is the most anguishing aspect of the whole episode. He has made me an accessory, not just by passing along his scandalous tale, but by exploiting my preparedness to believe him. Which is precisely how Big Lies work, as well. Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration’s fictions about Iraq frightened America because they seemed to confirm the nation’s worst fears and suspicions. Mike Daisey may be no Dick Cheney, but how do I know?

On this particular issue, those who are interested in an intimate look inside China’s factories should read Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls.