The US public radio show, This American Life has withdrawn an audio version of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, written and performed by Mike Daisey.
In the show, which is a version of a theatre production which has run for several months, Daisey claims to have interviewed workers outside the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen.
Talking to CBS News about meeting those workers earlier this year, Daisey said ‘In my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who are 14 years old. I met workers who were 13 years old. I met workers who were 12. Do you really think Apple doesn’t know?’ Daisey also claimed to have spoken to workers whose hands shook uncontrollably afther they were poisoned by the chemical N-Hexane.
Those claims now appear to have been made up. Rob Schmitz, a reporter for National Public Radio tracked down Daisey’s translator in China, Cathy Lee, and asked her if she remembered meeting the people Daisey described. ‘I met her in the exact place she took Daisey—the gates of Foxconn. So I asked her: “Did you meet people who fit this description?”
“No,” she said.
“So there was nobody who said they were poisoned by hexane?” I continued.
Lee’s answer was the same: “No. Nobody mentioned the Hexane.”’
Schmitz, along with This American Life host, Ira Glass, then confronted Daisey and asked him whether he met the workers, as he had claimed: ‘I met workers in, um, Hong Kong, going to Apple protests who had not been poisoned by hexane but had known people who had been, and it was a constant conversation among those workers,’ replied Daisey.
This American Life said it would dedicate an entire show to separating ‘fact from fiction, when it comes to Apple’s manufacturing practices in China.’ Glass said that Daisey had lied to him and his production team and said they were ‘horrified to have let something like this onto public radio.’
Daisey, however, was unrepentant. ‘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…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,’ he wrote in a blog post.
