The substance of things unseen

[dynamicsymmetry]

So a while back I was making a fairly big deal out of This American Life's broadcast of "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory", Mike Daisey's wrenching monologue about his trip to China and the Foxconn factory where many Apple products are made. Which is now apparently either mostly or entirely untrue. Mike Daisey made it up. He made it up and then

Comments

[maccaj]

I have such mixed feelings about this, and my feelings didn't become mixed till the end of act two (when Daisey came to elaborate on his motivations).

Not sure how to organize what I'm thinking just yet, but here goes.

1) What Daisey did in misrepresenting and outright lying to TAL and further news outlets is utterly and unequivocally wrong.

2) What TAL did in retracting the story and doing an exhaustive post-mortem was absolutely right.

.... and after that, it gets complicated.

I don't disagree that feeling like we as writers have to misrepresent or exaggerate the truth in order to get people to care is a dangerous and ultimately damaging road. It is. The rules are different in fiction as opposed to nonfiction, and if you're representing yourself as a nonfiction writer, there really shouldn't be that much of a difference between your work and journalism... the main one is that in journalism, there's more of an ability and a process with which to check your facts. But in either case, facts should *matter* equally.

Here's where my mixed feelings come in though - toward the end of the interview, I feel like Daisey and Ira (who is one of my favorite people ever) are speaking different languages, and a certain part of me "sides" with Daisey... or at least understands what he's saying in a way that Ira doesn't seem to grasp. To be clear, I wouldn't be in a mood to really listen to the guy who'd just made a fool of me, my team, my workplace, and all of public radio if I were Ira, either, and I think he showed his usual amazing measured restraint. I just found myself surprised to understand Daisey's point of view at *all*.

A couple excerpts from the transcript:

Mike Daisey: I am agreeing it is not up to the standards of journalism and that’s why it was completely wrong for me to have it on your show.
[....]
Ira Glass: Right but you’re saying that the only way you can get through emotionally to people is to mess around with the facts, but that isn’t so.
Mike Daisey: I’m not saying that’s the only way to get through to people emotionally. I’m just saying that this piece, in how it was built for the theater, follows those rules. I’m not saying it’s the only way to do things.
[....]
Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it.
Mike Daisey: 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.
Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk - people take it as a literal
truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true.

(Me again) This is an issue of the two men using words to mean very different things. Good writing *is* truth... all good writing is truth. Find me a memoir that's literally true and would stand up to journalism. Find me any halfway decent autobiography or biography that doesn't contain at least one apocryphal incident. I can't think of one. I've been going through every nonfiction work I've ever read, saw or heard, which are considerable, and I can't think of even one where I'd be comfortable saying that it didn't contain some window dressing or failings of memory or a little dramatic flourish.

(cont)

[maccaj]

Storytelling is the art of knowing how to keep an audience, and being willing to adjust the facts a bit to do so. Journalism is the art of getting an account exactly correct, and risking that said account may be dull or have less impact simply because it doesn't directly appeal to our emotional nature. A good storyteller will be able to keep an audience with minimal fact adjustment, and a good journalist can make a factual account engaging... but at the base level, they have exactly opposite priorities.

Daisey is a storyteller... Ira Glass is a journalist. And that's why this story never could have worked on TAL, even if Daisey was honest... to Glass, TAL, and NPR, it would have been an instance of "well, that was really interesting till he threw the facts away." To Daisey, it was a case of, "I'm going to knit these facts together into the best possible *story*."

Where Daisey went wrong was in not coming clean the instant TAL contacted him. He should have said "Look, this is theater, not journalism. My show is a composite. If you want to make my show a *part* of one of your programs on Apple and China, fine, but people pay me to *tell a good story* and people pay you to get the facts right, so let's proceed carefully if at all."

I could go on, but like I said, my thoughts on this aren't entirely organized yet.

[maccaj]

Oh, I know one other thing I was going to say... I think writers have to be careful with what we call "truth" and I think journalists should be careful what they call "fiction" and I don't like the idea that everything is either one or the other. Of course journalists have to be interested in truth at their jobs, and facts are paramount... but for Ira to imply that if a work of theater presents itself as factual but doesn't carry a disclaimer, that author is somehow *lying* is ridiculous. (He's allowed to be ridiculous, in his situation. I would be, too. But that doesn't change the fact that it's fucking ridiculous.) When I watch the West Wing, it feels true. A lot of it *is* true, either factually or emotionally. But I don't get to go harangue Aaron Sorkin for claiming that "Honor thy father" is the third commandment. It's a dramatic work, in a non-fiction world, using real facts to depict a fictional presidency... and some of the real facts were wrong. And if that's okay for TV writers... if it's okay to point it out but not to scream about it - then it has to be okay for *all* writers apart from journalists... and even okay for journalists, as long as they're not *doing journalism* or presenting a given work *as* journalism.

There's an episode of This American Life about a disabled guy I happen to know, and it makes me cringe. It's not that any facts are wrong, per se, but it's an ablebodied journalist (Ira) failing to ask a whole hell of a lot of questions that any disabled person would have (should have, does) ask Mike. The net effect is that the portrait of Mike is inauthentic. Mike comes off as a combination of supercrip, inspiration, and someone to be pitied... not because Ira set out to portray him that way - it's one of the better "crips in media" interviews - but because he never thought to ask certain questions. I don't blame him for that, but does that mean I get to call his journalism "fiction"?

I don't think it does, and I think setting up a dichotomy of "everything 100% factual is fact, and anything else is fiction" not only insinuates that fiction is somehow less valuable (or more frivolous, or less work, or "a trick"), but also implies that journalists are open to just the kind of accusations I postulate could be valid with regard to his very own story on Mike.

And there be dragons.