During an Ask Me Anything on Reddit today, “This American Life”‘s Ira Glass responded to one of several questions posed about the retraction of “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.”
“I wouldn’t listen to a theatre performer who doesn’t speak the language and has proven that he has a penchant for lying,” says Schmitz, who leans forward when he talks about Daisey. (more...)
Kara and Walt—do you really think you asked hard questions tonight? Goodness, you got Cook to admit…that Ping was a failure! That’s amazing. If only you had another hour, so you could get him to tell us who he liked best on Dawson’s Creek and what kind of ice cream is best: vanilla or cookies and cream.While giving great play to his own failings vis-a-vis factual reporting, Daisey turns his fire on tech writers.
Perhaps instead they are “journalists”, in quotes, as almost every writer for technology outlets must feel like: hemmed between the corporations who make the devices, the PR teams, and all the forces that exist in our marketplace. Maybe they arrive at a place where they have an outlandish conference that feels like an industry kissing party because that’s precisely what it is.A Twitter spat, inevitably, followed, and here is the the inevitable Storify document. (more...)
In an interview, [host Ira] Glass said no one at his program was concerned about Sedaris before the [Mike] Daisey episode. “We just assumed the audience was sophisticated enough to tell that this guy is making jokes and that there was a different level of journalistic scrutiny that we and they should apply,” he said.(more...)
But the Daisey debacle has brought about a reassessment. Glass said three responses are under discussion: fact-checking each of Sedaris’s stories to ensure their accuracy, labeling them to alert the audience that the stories contain “exaggerations” or doing nothing.
At the moment, Glass said, he thinks the best course is to check Sedaris’s facts to the extent that stories involving memories and long-ago conversations can be checked. The New Yorker magazine subjects Sedaris’s work to its rigorous fact-checking regime before it publishes his stories.
Philadelphia magazine’s research editor, Annie Monjar, on the backlash against Mike Daisey and the importance of fact checking:
What we can take away from this episode is that even today, in 2012, readers still want stories that draw power from honesty and temperance. We can rest a little easier knowing that even as the industry around us buckles, the oft-toed line between truth and speculation does, in fact, still exist, and that someone out there is still taking the time to draw it.
“Important if true.”
Newspapers used to employ that phrase in headlines as a way to communicate to readers the unconfirmed nature of the information they were about to read.
In truth, it was also something of a sales pitch: Read … Read more
It’s rare for a program to dedicate an entire episode to retracting a previous episode and to issue a press release explaining why. “This American Life” has put time and resources into retracting “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple … Read more
Fact checking is a real process, but what “This American Life” did wasn’t fact checking.
When the news broke that “This American Life” was retracting the episode “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,” Ira Glass made an effort to … Read more
New York Times serial plagiarist Jayson Blair comments to David Carr about the Mike Daisey/”This American Life” retraction:
All the good editing, fact-checking and plagiarism-detection software in the world is not going to change the fact that anyone is, under the right circumstances, capable of anything and that journalism is essentially built on trust.