Mike Daisey: Lying to expose Apple

Is it okay for an artist to lie “on the way to telling a greater truth?” asked David Carr in The New York Times. That’s the question at the center of the scandal over Mike Daisey’s one-man play, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Daisey’s critically acclaimed show details the harrowing working conditions he claimed to have witnessed firsthand at the Foxconn factories in China, where Apple products are made. The radio show This American Life recently broadcast parts of the monologue as fact to an audience of 1.8 million. But it emerged last week that Daisey had fabricated some of the more dramatic elements of his show, including personally seeing gun-toting factory guards, 13-year-old workers, and a factory employee who “maimed a hand while manufacturing the iPad.” Daisey apologized this week, but suggested his inventions served the “greater narrative truth” that Apple does, in fact, exploit Chinese workers. “What I do is not journalism,” he said. But Daisey presented his show as “nonfiction,” said James Poniewozik in Time.com, and this was no personal memoir. He was morally indicting Apple, and thus had an obligation to stick to the facts.

Even if Daisey exaggerated what he personally witnessed, said Yang Su and Xin He in CNN.com, his play is quite accurate. And it’s had a huge impact. A lengthy New York Times exposé, published after his NPR segment, confirmed widespread labor abuses in Apple’s Chinese-owned plants, and Apple was “forced to acknowledge that conditions in its supplier factories can be improved.” An independent auditor was brought in, and Foxconn gave its employees raises and reduced their hours. Daisey made only one real error, said Tim Worstall in Forbes.com. That was in portraying his monologue as literally true in every detail. Otherwise, it would have been fine for him as an artist to “manipulate the emotions of his listeners so they pay attention to what he thinks is important.”

If there’s a lesson to be taken from this, said Felix Salmon in Reuters.com, it’s to be wary of “fabulous journalism.” Crusaders like Daisey sometimes borrow the conventions of the theater to make their stories simpler and more dramatic. Just keep this rule in mind: “The more theatrical the story you hear and the more it divides the world into goodies vs. baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be.” Real life is almost always gray, not black and white.

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