Jack Shafer

Thanks to the “Retraction” episode of This American Life and his appearance at Georgetown University last night, we now know more than we ever wanted to about Mike Daisey’s damage control theories.

On the radio, Daisey tendered the non-apology apology. Yes, for his retracted episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” Daisey confessed that he had lied in the original broadcast about what he saw in China, whom he talked to there, when he talked to them, how many factories he visited, and so on. He also admitted that he lied to This American Life‘s editors in the fact-checking process. For a complete run.

Daisey has now acknowledged his lies, but has also attempted several defenses and obfuscations of them. On his blog last Friday, the day the scandal was broken, he stated that: “I stand by my work,” and “What I do is not journalism.” I leave it to the reader to figure what “I stand by my work” means when the work under discussion has been discredited. But the “not journalism” comment is very peculiar to make at this late stage because, as Craig Silverman points out, This American Life producer Brian Reed put Daisey on notice before the episode ran that they wanted it to be “totally, utterly unassailable by anyone who might hear it.”

“Utterly unassailable” strikes me as a laudable, if unreachable, goal for journalism. To the producer’s request, Daisey responded: “I totally get that.” So even if he doesn’t “do” journalism, he knew that he was being asked to “do” journalism on This American Life.

Daisey’s evasions and justifications have circled out wider in the last couple of days. Yesterday, he wrote in his blog that if you think that the story of his lies is bigger than the story of working conditions in China, then “something is wrong with your priorities.” He says this just one paragraph away from reiterating his apology to “anyone who felt betrayed” by his radio performance. “I stand by that apology,” he writes, before launching into a defense of making stories “subordinate to the truth.”

Daisey’s scrambled logic continued last night at Georgetown University. There, Daisey claimed of his Apple factory monologue, “The truth of that story is very real,” according to this account by Erik Wemple, who writes:

In sincere tones, [Daisey] repeated his apologies to This American Life executive producer Ira Glass and extended his regrets to his audiences and to journalists. He confessed to being “wrong” for having exposed the radio program to such risk. But “I can’t say it was wrong to air” the program, Daisey argued.

We shouldn’t be stunned when Daisey’s contrition equation fails to add up. He apologizes to Glass, to his audiences, and to journalists and confesses to the “wrong” of hurting the radio show. But he “can’t say it was wrong to air” the show. As Wemple reports, Daisey still maintains that he got contested facts right in his monologue. Daisey told the Georgetown crowd that he did see guards with guns at the Foxconn plant, although nobody will confirm that. He did speak to a 13-year-old outside the factory, although confirmation of that is not available, and so on.

Daisey even feeds the audience this non sequitur: “If I wanted to make it up, I wouldn’t have gone to China.” Again, we should not be stunned if Daisey made up a bunch of facts after what he found in China was not the precise story he was dying to tell.

Anybody this given to prevarication must have revealed his methods at some point in his career, and — wouldn’t you know it? — Daisey gave away his secret of how to repel questions in an extended interview in 2005, in conjunction with the performance of his monologue 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com in Portland, Oregon. The show, which also exists in book form, is based on Daisey’s three-year stint as an Amazon worker in Seattle.

When grilled, imitate Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and toss your interrogators a hall-of-mirrors response to chase, Daisey says. From the interview [emphasis added]:

I think Amazon made me the person I am today. Aside from making me very wary of corporate situations, I try to apply the marketing savvy I learned from Jeff Bezos. [laughs] I really pattern the marketing of this show and other shows after the way I saw Amazon talk about itself.

For instance, when people from the media started talking about the show and the book, they’d say, “Oh — he’s a disgruntled worker!” And I’d take a page from Jeff. In every interview about Amazon, someone would ask him a binary question: “Is Amazon x?” And he’d never say “yes” or “no” — he’d always take a middle path that opens up five more questions. So someone would say, “Why are you so angry at Amazon?,” and I’d say, “Oh, I’m not angry at Amazon. In fact, it’s more of a love story.” And it opens up conversations with the media: They’ll say, “Well, now I can’t write it in 20 words — I guess I’ll have to write a longer piece that’s more complex, or I guess I’ll actually have to be interested.”

Just when we thought Daisey had repeated every fabulist excuse in the book, maybe he’s given us something fresh: Jeff Bezos made me do it.

For those Johnny Deadlines eager to skim the published version of 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com for additional Daisey lies, don’t bother. On the acknowledgement page, he indemnifies himself as completely as possible, writing: “Some facts were injured in the telling of this story. The truth, however, remains unharmed.”

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PHOTO: A protester wearing a mask of Apple Inc founder Steve Jobs performs a street drama with a university student playing the role of a Foxconn worker during a protest in Hong Kong, May 7, 2011. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

As tech giants Apple and Amazon apply the squeeze, there has never been a worse time to be in the publishing business. Apple has turned its disruptive death ray on the publishers with an update of its free “iBooks” app, which allows anybody with a Mac to build an ebook and publish for sale in the company’s iBookstore. The rapacious bastards at Amazon are attacking on the same front with their KF8 Kindle software, plus they’re signing book authors (Deepak Chopra, Timothy Ferriss, James Franco, Penny Marshall and more to come) to their publishing imprint. An email, purportedly written by an anonymous book industry “insider” and published at PandoDaily today, got a lot of attention on the Web with its claim that Amazon’s ultimate goal is to destroy conventional publishing.

If it’s murder for publishers and booksellers, though, it’s heaven for book readers. I’ve been buying, reading and collecting books since the late 1960s, and with the exception of the times I’ve found rare first editions for sale for a buck at thrift stores or made similar discoveries at library-discard sales, books have never been more available or more affordable in my lifetime.

Until the late 1990s, I always kept in my wallet a neatly folded short list of books I was looking for. Theoretically, any of these books could have been mine by paying list price at a bookstore or by paying a  book finder to run them down for me. But because I was so poor in my early years and so cheap in my later ones, I always resisted paying full ticket for a book. Any book I purchased would remain on my bookshelves — even after I had read it — because I might need it again for work or pleasure. The only time I got rid of books was when I visited used shops, where I would exchange books in a trade.

Then came the Internet. The pain and pleasure of chasing down new books was erased by my Amazon account, where they were always cheaper. The never-ending stacks of used books at AbeBooks and Powell’s (and later at Amazon) made my neatly folded short list obsolete and, to my delight, put a smaller dent in my wallet. One of the great joys of buying used books online is that the sources are now international. Just last week I picked up Michael Frayn’s “Towards the End of the Morning” for $10 delivered from the UK.

Oh, every now and then I’ll strike out. A book will be so rare that not even the AbeBooks consortium has it, or if they do the price is prohibitive. Sometimes the title is so obscure that Google Books or Archive.org hasn’t gotten around to preserving it and I will have to go to my public library or a university library. But that’s really rare. Even if a book is out of print, it’s usually within reach, which is the whole point anyway.

The falling prices of new books caused me to buy more of them. But the collapse of used-book prices brought on by the Web are what really caused my collection to swell. The lower prices changed my relationship with books. I no longer considered each and every volume “my precious.” Yes, I still loved every book, but the Web had made them easily replaceable. In the new order, a book that wasn’t carrying its weight in my collection could lose its spot on the shelf and be shuffled off to a used shop. But now that the Web has driven down the cost of used books, the cash or trade that I was offered rarely made it worth the trip to the shop. So I started tossing books, or if my mother-in-law insisted, I would donate them to the local library book sale. Had my fireplace been working, I would have burned them to stay warm in the winter.

Except for a few volumes in my library — my journalism books, my drug books, my Mencken books, my lit-favorites, and a few other volumes I’ve developed a sentimental connection with — not many books have a greater hold on me than a stack of magazines. (And, yes, I used to collect magazines. You would have adored my collection of the first five years of Wired.)

The electronification of books has only made this reader’s life better. Whenever I need a recent book on deadline and my local bookstore doesn’t have it and Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature fails me, I can still usually download it via Kindle. Filling my iPhone and family iPad with free classics (like Lafcadio Hearn’s “Kwaidan”) I feel just like the character in the “Twilight Zone” episode “Time Enough at Last,” only I still have my eyeglasses!

I welcome the Apple and Amazon wrecking balls if only because their efforts will add to the ubiquity of books, and that growing ubiquity will further drive down the prices of used books. At the rate we’re going, it will soon make economic sense for me to repair my fireplace and stave off winter’s cold by burning books. I intend to use my paperback edition of “Fahrenheit 451″ as tinder for the first blaze.

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Send free ebooks to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. I hope someday to publish my collected Twitter feed as an ebook. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns, and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller speaks at a news conference introducing a digital textbook service, in New York, January 19, 2012.  REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton