Crazy Daisey's apple picking.

This american life created a show called retraction. Their most popular episode ever:Mr. Daisey and the apple factory, contained lots of lies.

Better than the retracted episode.

In this episode, Ira glass confronts Daisey with the lies he has told. If you have no clue what all this is about, I encourage you to go listen to the retractions episode, and if you really want the full story, listen to the apple factory episode too. Don't just read the transcript, because there's a lot of weight in the way things are said.

This retraction episode, is more worth to me, than Daisey's episode, even without considering the lies in there, it's journalism at it's best. You se people really wanting to get to the truth. This makes for a very awkward episode, as you can nearly hear Daisey's brain going in overdrive, trying to come up with an answer to Glass's questions.

A play outside the theatre.

In the retraction episode, Daisey states the following:p> 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. And that's something I deeply regret. And I regret that the people who are listening, the audience of This American Life, who know that it is a journalistic enterprise-- if they feel misled or betrayed, I regret to them as well.

He states that what he said was not up to the standards of journalism, but only seems to regret what he said on This American Life. Does that mean he does not consider the dozens of other programs he has been on: TechCrunch, CNET, Real Time with Bill Maher,c-span..., to be journalism? I find that very hard to believe.

Daisey admits that he has 'taken shortcuts' in his monologue. He gives the following explanation why: Everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end – to make people care. I'm not going to say that I didn't take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. I get that he wants people's attention, that he aggregated information from other stories into the story about his own story, and made some facts seem a little worse then they were, to make people aware of the problems in China. As I said, he indeed shouldn't have brought it as news, but I'd go as far, that this should never have beeen part of a play. He tells the story in such a way, that appears to be truth. If you don't explicitly tell them, you shouldn't expect the audience to just know that it's partly/mostly fiction, they're listening to.

If you think, you'll only get heard by telling lies, I think you'll be wrong in any situation. I think Daisey should have either told the story, as it really was. You can get enough drama by telling about people getting poisoned while making an ipad, if you have just red it, it's not necessary to make it seem as if you talked to the man in question. And if you don't have enough information to tell a good story, either you'll have to look further and dig deeper, or there's really no story there, and you'll have to admit it to yourself. I'm afraid that that's Daisey's biggest problem. He came there, and the conditions he discovered weren't as bad as he was expecting. Not bad enough to make a show that would shock people.