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

This week, the highly regarded public radio show This American Life learned a lesson that many journalists, including me, have learned the hard way: It’s almost impossible for an editor to fact-check a contributor who lies.

The show, hosted by Ira Glass, just retracted its Jan. 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,” adapted from Mike Daisey’s popular one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which is about working conditions in a Chinese factory that makes Apple products.

Daisey’s deceptions were uncovered by Rob Schmitz, a China-based reporter for Marketplace. This American Life will air an hourlong explanation and re-examination this weekend, featuring both Glass and Daisey, about the circumstances behind the retraction. Glass and the show are to be commended for their quick response, and everybody who cares about real journalism owes a debt of gratitude to Schmitz.

We don’t yet know all the lies Daisey told Glass and the listeners of This American Life, but here’s a taste. In the Jan. 6 segment, Daisey said:

The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can’t even pick up a glass.

I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It’s like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine. And you need to know that this is eminently avoidable. If these people were rotated monthly on their jobs, this would not happen.

When a doubting Schmitz contacted Daisey’s translator, he learned that the artist hadn’t talked to workers poisoned with hexane. We have now learned that he met people who knew people who had been poisoned. So why did he lie? Because, Daisey said, “I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of my trip.”

On his own website, Daisey offers this larger rationalization, which deserves complete quotation.

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by the New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed This American Life to air an excerpt from my monologue. This American Life is essentially a journalistic — not a theatrical — enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

This grander explanation, which invokes the liberties one can take with the truth working inside the theater, skirts the question of why he lied to Glass, who obviously trusted him to tell the truth. Daisey’s only stated “regret” here is that he allowed the program to air part of his monologue. Meanwhile, the New York Times has excised a paragraph from an Oct. 6, 2011, op-ed he wrote, because “Questions have been raised about the truth of a paragraph in the original version of this article that purported to talk about conditions at Apple’s factory in China.” As I write, surely others are scouring his book, 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com (2002) for fabrications.

Perhaps Daisey will offer more complete contrition on This American Life‘s hair-shirt edition this weekend, but I doubt it. Liars come up with all sorts of justifications when caught. In Daisey’s case, he claims “dramatic license” gives him the right to lie to Glass. Other apprehended fibbers working in the journalistic arena have blamed booze, drugs, madness, overwork, bad fact-checking, notes got lost, wrong version got sent to the editor, or family problems.

I’m still waiting for somebody who got caught lying while practicing journalism to say why he did it. I have my theory: 1) They lie because they don’t have the time or talent to tell the truth, 2) they lie because they think they can get away with it, and 3) they lie because they have no respect for the audience they claim to want to enlighten. That would be an ideal subject for a one-man theatrical performance.

(Afterthought, March 17: If this piece interested you, allow me to direct you to my piece from earlier in the week about the fabulisms in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.)

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PHOTO: Mike Daisey appearing on MSNBC’s The Ed Show.

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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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

If BMW had an auteur—the kind of auteur Apple had until last night—would his fans gather at local BMW dealerships when he died to light candles and toss flowers in front of showroom windows the way Steve Jobs fans are now at Apple Stores around the world? Would they storm Twitter to post recollections of the first and second BMWs they owned and thank Mr. BMW for having made their ordinary trips to the store for milk and eggs more like cosmic adventures in motoring?

Obviously not. No other gadgets have wormed themselves into the global psyche the way Steve Jobs’s have. Like most of Jobs’s coups, the takeover was a matter of design. Although he had been synonymous with Apple since the late 1970s by virtue of the computer he developed and marketed with Steve Wozniak, and the cult of Apple was already in full bloom at the time of the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Jobs didn’t fashion himself the maximum leader of the cult until he returned to the company in 1996.

Jobs’s restoration was read by his followers as a resurrection, and he encouraged this interpretation by using his regained powers as Apple’s guru to further mesh his identity with that of the company’s products. Jobs became his Macs and iPods and they became him. By and large, they were pretty good products, if not a little pricey. (Ask me, I’ve owned a few.)

What Jobs understood was that there was and is room in the computer market for a prettier or marginally better product—packed tightly in a very fashionable box—that could be sold at a premium price if he marketed them as “Veblen goods,” luxury products that convey status upon their purchasers. Jobs hasn’t been alone in this discovery. Take the modern American kitchen. It has become our most densely populated Veblen-goods petting zoo, with its Viking six-burner range with griddle and double oven, its Sub-Zero refrigerator-freezer, its Bosch silent dishwasher, and its MoMA tea kettle. The modern kitchen appliance signals the high status of its owner to friends and neighbors, and so do Apple’s products. When Appleheads visit your home or office and see your iMac or MacBook Air, you can see the Oh, you’re one of us! thought bubble forming over their heads. Conversely, these folks emit a palpable sense of disappointment if catch you with a Dell or a Toshiba. But you seemed so creative! You can observe this sort of messaging on the subway, too, as Apple owners steal glances at one another, bonding wordlessly as they pinch and flick their way through their iPhones and iPads.

Becoming a loved brand wasn’t easy for Apple. Given the automatic hatred the creative class (or those who think of themselves part of the creative class) has for corporations, Apple and Jobs should have been targets of scorn. What he and Apple had going for them at the beginning was their underdog position against IBM and then Microsoft. Apple wisely projected itself as the alt-computer company, a distinction Jobs cemented with the 1984 Super Bowl commercial. Just using Apple products was supposed to be an act of rebellion against the system.

After the Jobs resurrection, he made sure that salvation came with every purchase. For what are Apple Stores but places of worship, with priests who possess secret knowledge manning a Genius Bar at the far end of the temple? Is the Apple logo on the wall not a late-20th century cross? Is every Apple employee toting a handheld credit-card scanner not a human tithing-station? You laugh, but I can’t tell you how many Sundays I’ve gone to my neighborhood Apple Store to renew my faith, and to indoctrinate my children in its fundamentals.

Jobs’s flirtations with Eastern philosophy give credence to my interpretation, as does the energy he spent playing the role of the infallible leader. Jobs told his customers, point blank, that if they wanted his products and services, they’d have to use them the way he delivered them. Just as the pope doesn’t let anybody take a bath in holy water, Jobs wasn’t about to allow anybody to jailbreak an iPhone without at least risking excommunication.

Evidence of Jobs’s psychological hammerlock on the culture can be found in today’s news stories about his life and times, which quote heavily and without caustic comment from his speeches and interviews. These quotations would be ridiculed as Khalil Gibranian nonsense if spoken by anybody else. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become,” Jobs has said. And, “I want to put a ding in the universe.” And, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” And, “You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” And, “There is no reason not to follow your heart.” And, “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent.”

I predict a quickie book, The Eternal Wisdom of Steve Jobs, in stores and e-book shops soon.

The doublethink of the Apple slogan “Think Different,” revealed Apple as an oddly totalitarian organization (no, you can’t change your own battery in your iPhone). What the company has always wanted its followers—I mean, its customers—to do was think like Jobs. Follow your bliss! But do it inside Steve’s cocoon. That so many customers regarded Jobs and Apple as rebel leaders instead of techno-conformity ringleaders does not flatter human perception.

None of what I’ve written is intended to subtract from the products and services he helped create, his extraordinary business comeback, or his tenacity, all of which I admire. My problem isn’t with Steve Jobs but the sloppy veneration of Steve Jobs. He made computers, pretty good computers. Isn’t that enough?

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Charles Arthur shares some pop psychology ideas on why some people love Apple and some people hate it. (I’m in neither group.) Use your Mac to send hate mail to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and your iPhone to monitor my Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

Photo: Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs gives a wave at the conclusion of the launch of the iPad 2 on stage during an Apple event in San Francisco, California March 2, 2011. Jobs took the stage to a standing ovation on Wednesday, returning to the spotlight after a brief medical absence to unveil the second version of the iPad. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach