I see that This American Life is retracting their Mike Daisy piece about Apple Computer factories in China because of “significant inaccuracies” and because Daisy “lied” to the TAL producers. Wow.
To me this is lot about the value of true journalism–which to me is a set of procedures, methods and ethics that lead as close to the truth as possible. It is also about how dramatists (or most of Fox News) use a facsimile of journalism to lend weight and credibility to their stories, just like new-ageists or creationists or global warming denialists borrow the forms of science to steal credibility for their causes. True journalism has been so effective and good at what it does that people want to wage their own jihad under its flag. Journalism is something we should value and protect, and I’m glad to see TAL taking bold steps to do that.
I have to say that I didn’t really ever like the Mike Daisy performance. I liked some of the stories it contained, but I just didn’t like it for reasons that I couldn’t exactly put my finger on. It seemed basically fake, manipulative and self serving. I’m not saying I knew the guy was making stuff up. But the whole way he told this story, it seemed like he knew what he wanted to say before he even went into it. He wrote a fictional piece in his mind, something that could be true, and then went to China and pretended it was true.