Full quote: "When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story on stage, when I left the theater I had a lot of questions. I mean, he's not a reporter, and I wondered, did he get it right? And so we've actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show."
From http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/t... or http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.thi...
adding “this is theater,” he said. “Not journalism.”
unbelievable. shameless.
Calling to mind Jack Shafer (now at Reuters, formally Slate's media critic) on the problematic nature of narrative journalism:
http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2012/03/14/dismantling-t...
Whatever the case, the frequency of reported cases in the mass media is significant. Poynter has been tracking it for years; here are some of the reported cases from last year:
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/156485/o...
Remember James Frey (tricked Oprah and her staff).
He's doing quite well, see "current work":
Interestingly his show's run off broadway is scheduled through the 18th; anyone want to start a pool on that?
There's Henry Blodget as well:
My understanding is that he settled when he was accused of touting stocks he didn't like. But I also understand that he actually lost a lot of money on such stocks.
He paid $4m in restitution to investors, but apparently the total amount of lost money that could be traced to his transactions was less than the interest on the $4m over the half-decade after the fine. So the case looks a lot more complicated than the capsule version.
exactly.
James Frey lied about his own personal experience and Henry Blodget was involved in securities fraud. They are relatively unknown outside their industry.
Mike Daisey told lies that he presented to news organizations, blogs, etc. as facts -- for money and self-promotion at the expense of a well respected company. CNN, NYTimes, The Washington Post, etc. wrote articles based on Mike Daisey's lies. In my view this is similar to what happened to Dan Rather a few years ago. People will forget, but they will remember.
By the time the novel was finished, Sinclair was convinced the pair were guilty; but he released it anyway because of its "higher truth".
I have always considered Truman Capote, Tom Wolf, Terry Southern and their ilk my heroes and sources of inspiration, even though I have been well aware of their use of composite characters and other "embellishments" that are frowned upon in modern magazines and newspapers. While I have never created a composite character myself, a couple of times I did describe a composite scene: say I had spent a week with my subjects and one night one of the characters made a remark at dinner, and the next night someone else said something else during dinner, I chose to recount those two events as taking place the same night during the same meal. I made that decision (which I'd discussed with my editor) becaue either the two events occured on two different nights randomly, and could have just as easily taken place on the same night, and I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the story or the reader's image of the scene, or, they may have been a good reason for these two events to have occured separately, but that reason was complicated, and explaining it would have detracted from the story. Did I do a disservice to the truth? I don't think so. Here's why.
To explain it in terms familiar to the readers of this forum, journalism is a "reverse problem". The journalist's job is not listing facts, but extracting a model of the truth from a sample set of observation data. This is a very difficult problem. In contrast to what many critics think, a good journalists must not only stick to "the facts", because the facts are simply a biased sampling of reality. Sticking to the facts is just like connecting sample points with lines - it's called overfitting and it's as gross a mishandling of the truth as negligent interpolation or extrapolation is. Neither sticking to facts nor "completing" them is "the truth". A good journalist is one who is able to recreate a good model of reality, a fine approximation of it, by relying on observed facts as well as on gut instinct and genuine emotion, and who's able to convey the model as clearly as possible to his audience, introducing neither outright fabrications nor irrelevant and confusing facts.
To extend your model, you're conflating direct data collection/experimentation with literature assessment, and essentially saying that's acceptable. It's not.
A journalist interviewing an expert (academic, or other specialist) is analogous to the literature review in a research context: you do not have direct observation, but you are assuming that peer review and other mechanisms have ensured the literature is grounded in direct observation.
A journalist recounting first-hand experiences or recounting those of people he/she has interviewed is really doing direct data collection or experimentation: the reason you try to get multiple sources for a significant claim is precisely why scientists run experiments multiple times.
A journalist claiming second-hand experiences as first-hand is equivalent to claiming to have observational data when in actuality you are relaying the conclusion of another experiment.
Take this neuro-toxin example: it happened to N people, but by claiming to meet them personally, he's implying it happens more often but is covered up, which would mean the real prevalence is higher (when in reality, we have no evidence that they are).
Or take the suicide rates. By claiming concentration via personal experience, the claim is contrary to what we know through more rigorous data collection, which is that the rates firm-wide are lower than for the Chinese population in general.
Also, the problem of your metaphor is you presume that the model f(observed facts, gut instinct, emotion) yields more valid inference than the sum of multiple journalists' f(observed facts). This is crap. If f(gut instinct, emotion) skew systematically -- a more reasonable conclusion than the counterfactual -- then no, your approach is less valid.
Nassim Taleb had a nice bit about how he doesn't read the news; instead he reads textbooks or other long-production-cycle reports. This is because, he says, the frontier of knowledge doesn't change very often. So what you get in the news is a fundamentally biased sample of only the outliers (which sells papers) and never the consensus that is generally 99% of the body of knowledge.
And just to make sure: I'm not claiming that a longer, more careful and more rigorous observation does not yield a more accurate approximation. I'm just responding to a common complaint against journalists that if only they would stick to what they've actually observed and can prove that would necessarily produce better journalism; this is wrong.
And as for Nassim Taleb not reading the news, only textbooks - well, I don't have a problem with the first part, but if the obsessive, anal Mr. Taleb insists on only the most rigorous sources for learning about this world, than he has a very limited soul, indeed.
Actually, I've learned a lot of interesting things about the startup culture (specifically that of Silicon Valley) from reading HN comments (seriously, it's fascinating). There's probably a story there, one that hasn't been told yet.
A lie is still a lie.
Journalists report. Pundits opine.
You're one, or the other. You cannot be both. Or act like one while claiming to be the other.
No journalist should lie, even pundits, and it is indeed a reporter's job to report rather than opine, or, as I prefer to call it, "pass judgement". However, even when reporting, and especially in long-form non-fiction pieces (be it a magazine feature or a documentary film) it is is the unintelligent reporter who limits his audience's perspective to the clearly observable facts. The camera, as the saying goes, truly does lie, if only because the viewer cannot see what lies beyond its field of view. The mere selection of which facts to report (as you cannot report all of them unless you want to turn your audience into reporters) is the first act of building a model of reality. A lie is indeed a lie, but sometimes just reporting a few facts is a bigger lie (i.e. a worse approximation of reality) than completing the picture with the experienced reporter's gut instinct. It is not the reporter's job to pass judgment - that is indeed the realm of the pundit - but it is his job to reconstruct a good model of reality.
A reporter is not supposed to be merely a sensor, transcribing measurements. It is his job to try and extract meaning from those measurements as well; meaning, though not judgement. When you actually go out in the field, there is valuable meaning that you just sense even though you can't waive a piece of hard evidence to support it. A reporter that decides to spare that meaning from his audience betrays both his audience and the truth.
You might say, well, if that's the case, two reporters going out there might tell a very different story. That is true. That would also be true if both were simply reporting the hard facts. That would be true even if they both were to place a camera and let it stream images directly to your screen without any human intervention.
Um, no. your observation of the facts is biased. It's important that we accept that subjectivity lies within ourselves.
Hypothetical Mike Daisey who takes pride in his decisions: "I use a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell the story, and I do so with integrity."
Actual Mike Daisey who knows he's full of shit: "It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity."
Bill O'Reilly's spent days on rants based on deliberately misrepresenting what Sandra Fluke testified about. (1. She wants government to pay for birth control. No, students pay for insurance and wants contraceptives covered by the insurance they pay for. 2. She can't afford birth control but she can fly all over doing interviews. No, she was testifying about other students who had problems affording birth control without insurance, so what Fluke can afford is irrelevant. Etc.)
Fox News's whole raison d'être requires this kind of misinformation.
Calling lapses of journalistic integrity "slip-ups" is a disservice to serious journalism. Running a story without adequate fact checking because it will gain you viewers or because it closely aligns to your biases is a serious breach and shouldn't be downplayed, no matter what the ideology of the perpetrators are. The media is in a sorry state these days and this is a big part of why.
Edit: On second thought it's possible I may have misinterpreted your intent. If you mean that it's not worthwhile to delve into ideologically based score keeping, then I agree. I only object to the notion that we shouldn't highlight past transgressions, or that we should downplay them as effectively "accidents". In reality there is a history of effective hoaxes and "black bag" operations involving the press, in some of the most egregious cases where members of the press were fully complicit. That's worth talking about and bringing to the surface even if an attempted reckoning of the integrity of, say, Fox News vs. CBS is not.
Towards our 10,000 member goal, we heard from 9,025 folks over the last eight days, and we couldn't be more grateful. Some of the Summer Pledge Drive has been eliminated, but with your help, we can still eliminate some more.
'twoodfin is right to be cautious about valorizing WBEZ.
They are devoting THEIR ENTIRE SHOW this weekend to the retraction.
If you honestly think Fox News would do this, I want some of your drugs.
His "investigative journalism" of ACORN was shown to be edited to the point of nearly complete fabrication. No retraction from Fox.
I have noticed a drum beating on NPR since the piece aired regarding Apple's working conditions, on the news and the various podcasts. Will be interesting to watch for a change in tone.
I hear this asked, once in a while, on WPR, when the station manager is on a call-in show in the morning: why do you guys program to the left. And the answer is (I'm paraphrasing) That's who our audience is, so that's what we program for.
Heck, last week he as much admitted as such when he noted that they focused more on politics since the election of Scott Walker (R) as governor, and they will focus less when he's out of office: that's what our audience expects.
Which is understandable: if they had a Rush Limbaugh kind of guy on they'd loose audience and see donations drop. Be nice if they just admitted it.
I mean, what would consist of "balanced" in your view? The science leads towards a global warming hypothesis, and what's what they report. Most non-foxnews viewers agree that no WMD were found in Iraq. How are they supposed to split the difference on stuff like that?
NPR does not have ranting opinion shows that are political first. They have programs that are intended to inform. To the extent that liberals are more attracted to outlets like NPR than they are to outlets like currentTV, that's a statement about liberals, not about NPR.
I'm not the parent post, and I generally agree with you, but I'll take a stab at it.
I used to have the opinion that NPR was left-leaning. This was primarily due to when I listened to it, which was during my late-morning commute. I believe I was listening to "All Things Considered," which is usually quite a good listen.
However, on certain subjects, I noticed what seemed to be a significant bias in the moderator. Expressions of shock or disbelief at certain things, giving some speakers more time than others, and not calling some speakers on blatantly talking around the question, for example.
Last time I checked, I think I was evaluated as a mildly socialist libertarian. I happen to know a fair amount about guns. As such, I notice terrible inaccuracies and biased language fairly often when reading mainstream media reports on gun-related incidents. The misuse of automatic, semi-automatic, "assault rifle" (which means "scary looking" to journalists), cache versus personal arsenal, etc. It's really a lot like the low quality of technical and science coverage. Basically, similar technical ineptitude leads journalists to appear right wing (e.g. climate change deniers) as what leads them to appear left-leaning (e.g. complete ignorance of gun terminology).
Other parts of NPR have a ridiculously narrow view of the world. "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" drives me mad with the narrowness of the comedy on there. As it happens, much of their comedy would probably fall under the category of leftist, but I was personally offended by the narrowness and inanity of an apolitical joke (specifically, they were laughing at an experimental airbag for motorcyclists which protects the often-broken hips from impact with the gas tank, but the commentators repeatedly assumed it was solely to protect the groin, so they effectively made "pee-pee" jokes for five minutes).
Anyway, while I don't consider NPR to be a leftist news outlet, per se, I would appreciate if they spent more time educating themselves on certain subjects and tried harder to hold guests accountable for answering questions presented.
Those are imperfections more than the sign of some ideological motive. Presumably, the NPR hosts know very little about guns, so they misuse some terminology. Would be better if they were more educated but journalists are generalists, they can't know everything. They're not the gun network.
The climate change thing is totally different, Fox News will spend significant airtime harping on global warming, like we're talking many mentions per day, and the point isn't that they're not climate scientists (I'm not either), it's that they have no desire to listen to what climate scientists say. At all. Unless it agrees with their pre-conceived narrative. There are miles of distance between that and ignorance on the technicalities of the subject.
You don't have to be "the gun network" to know basic terminology about guns. If you don't have knowledge of something, don't report on it, or simply repeat the literal words of, say, the police. Don't try to spice up the story for broadcast by misusing terms. Similarly, you don't have to be a physicist to realize that you should create inflammatory headlines like, "neutrinos traveling faster than light, Einstein in tears!"
And anyway, the gun thing was just an example of how news outlets in general often get things wrong in a way that effectively creates a bias which is perceived to be left-leaning. I've seen the same thing happen when discussing nuclear power, military weaponry research, and countless other topics. And it's not simply about ignorance of technicalities, it's about misuse of terms and misinterpretation of information.
I was in the car, listening because they were going on about Jean Ferraca - whom I really dig. And it did catch me out as something extraordinary, but not unexpected, for WPR. I started to write it down when I got to my desk and thought 'whatever'.
Joy Cardin show for 3/12/2012, show number 120312C. I'll download and give it a re-listen, reply here.
Listening twice to Cardin - the things I do for integrity.
Show is archived here: http://www.wpr.org/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm?Code...
The things I do ...
Joy Cardin Show Dir WPR Mike Crane after 27:48 Greg in Stevens Point "I get tired of the political talk in the first two segments (tl:dl - he doesn't like politics, would donate, would like the morning programs to be more like the mid-day one, with gardening, home handy tips and various other stuff) "It's just listening to college teachers with an opinion .. it never ends .. been going on for three, four, five years however long it's been."
Mike WPR Director "Bascially starting with the election two years ago now that there just seemed to be a lot more politics to talk about. that we had a significant change in governance that I think has caused a lot of people to be curious about it maybe we'll find after this next election that things will shift a different way and there will be other things to talk about."
The second comment was rich. Greg complained about diversity - race issues. "Only one person of color."
Mike:(paraphrase) We have a Latina, too. And we're working on some other stuff.
The 'person of color' is the (imho) best guy _on_ WPR, Jonathan Overby. His 'Higher Ground' used to be a really entertaining live show with an audiance, live music. A few years ago they cut it back to Overby playing records.
I miss the way it used to be.
Now, Crane's comments can be seen as innocuous. And, maybe, he really did mean them that way.
But it's funny that the swing to 'talk about politics' didn't happen until after Walker (R) was elected. And that he said it would swing right back if he was voted out.
Thanks, I hadn't heard of Behind the News, found it on iTunes and it sounds awesome. Link for those interested:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-news-doug-henwood/...
I can't figure out how he's been able to keep a career going. Maybe this will--mercifully--be the end of it all.
Retraction: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/commentary/returni...
Story about the fabriaction: http://jimromenesko.com/2012/02/02/marketplace-scolded-for-a...
I listen to Marketplace everyday, and I just donated to both groups because it takes a lot of integrity to admit when you're wrong.
EDIT: donated to This American Life as well as Marketplace
I could see if the guy had maybe not earned some medals he claimed he had, or if he was lower rank than he claimed, but he claimed to be a returning veteran and was never even in the army.
Maybe it's just me, but verifying his army background and veteran status would be the first thing I would check going with a story titled, "Returning veteran has few marketable skills"
Admitting they were wrong is nice, but that's a pretty big wrong that was easily avoidable by doing even a little checking.
This is usually a distinction without a difference, but when it comes to evaluating the standards and practices of a particular show, it helps to know who actually has oversight.
A real news outlet determines the truth before, optionally, looking for or fabricating facts to support it.
Now, what's a good synonym for "slut"?
It's scary how easy it is to socially engineer people and get what you want.
While some of this comes from experience I feel that some people are just wired in a way that makes them easier to dupe independent of their education and intelligence.
The largest company in the world making their money on the backs of exploiting the very poorest is a common trope so it's one that doesn't get much fact checking.
People aren't wired that way, it takes a good 12 years of teaching them to regurgitate 'quasi-facts' to get them out of their more curious fact checking nature. Every kid wants to know why the sky is blue, but by the time they get to history class no one wants to know why Columbus discovered America.
Except they did fact check those parts:
"In our original broadcast, we fact checked all the things that Daisey said about Apple's operations in China," says Glass, "and those parts of his story were true, except for the underage workers, who are rare. We reported that discrepancy in the original show. (...)"
What wasn't true was the stuff that the guy claim to had experienced personally.
I'm a Chicago Public Radio member, too, but I didn't get an email. I'd certainly like to be on this list... checking spam folders now...
Apple was a sponsor of NPR in FY 2008 and 2009, and 2010.
I suspect they continue to be one.
Money is the best explanation for the PR push behind your email.
http://www.npr.org/about/aboutnpr/annualreports/NPR_AnnualRe...
http://www.npr.org/about/aboutnpr/annualreports/2009_NPRAnnu...
http://www.npr.org/about/aboutnpr/annualreports/NPRSponsorsD...
That's nice, but This American Life isn't made by NPR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Radio_International
> PRI is a major public media content creator and also distributes programs from many sources, competing with National Public Radio and American Public Media to provide programming to public radio stations.
in the words of Mike Daisey: "I used a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell a story"
PRI, as you note, is in competition with NPR (and CPM). They are producers of the journalistic expose' about a one man show not meeting the standards of investigative journalism. A strawman argument indeed.
So your position is that Apple is pressuring NPR which is pressuring Chicago Public Media which is pressuring Chicago Public Radio which is pressuring Public Radio International which is pressuring This American Life to issue a retraction?
I really don't think This American Life needed much pushing to retract admitted falsehoods.
I’m writing to tell you that tonight, This American Life and Marketplace will reveal that a story that we broadcast on This American Life this past January contained significant fabrications.
We’re retracting that story because we can’t vouch for its truth, and this weekend's episode of our show will detail the errors in the story, which was an excerpt of Mike Daisey's acclaimed one-man show, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." In it, Daisey tells how he visited a factory owned by Foxconn that manufactures iPhones and iPads in Shenzhen, China. He's performed the monologue in theaters around the country; it's currently at the Public Theater in New York.
When the original 39-minute excerpt was broadcast on This American Life, Marketplace China Correspondent Rob Schmitz wondered about its truth. He located and interviewed Daisey's Chinese interpreter Li Guifen (who goes by the name Cathy Lee professionally with westerners). She disputed much of what Daisey has been telling theater audiences since 2010 and much of what he said on the radio.
During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey's story, I and This American Life producer Brian Reed asked Daisey for this interpreter's contact information, so we could confirm with her that Daisey actually witnessed what he claims. Daisey told us her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn't work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.
At that point, we should've killed the story. But other things Daisey told us about Apple's operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn't think that he was lying to us. That was a mistake.
Schmitz does a 20-minute story on our show this weekend about his findings, and we'll also broadcast an interview I did with Daisey. Marketplace will feature a shorter version of Schmitz's report earlier in the evening. You can read more details on our website, and listen to our show on WBEZ at 7 p.m. tonight, and noon tomorrow.
We've been planning a live presentation of Daisey's monologue on stage at the Chicago Theatre on April 7th, with me leading a Q&A afterwards. Maybe you've heard me advertising it on the air. That show will be cancelled and all tickets will be refunded.
I've never had to write an email like this. Like all our friends and colleagues in public radio, I and my co-workers at This American Life work hard every day to make sure that what you hear on WBEZ is factually correct. We will continue to do that, and hope you can forgive this.