Ira Glass in the looking glass

As a critique of TAL, there’s not much to argue with here. However, Daisey reiterated and expounded on many of his exaggerations on radio and TV news shows - MSNBC certainly, so maybe even Fox. I asked him whether he felt like he’d learnt a dark secret about a lover on the BBC World Service programme World Have Your Say. I was flattered by his chuckle, I like something I say to strike a chord. Maybe his chuckle was nervous, as he realised that whilst he was striking a chord, the bell was chiming on his “artistic license” carried into factual reporting. I may have over-egged that metaphor, my apologies.

Is that a fact, Luke? Or are you extrapolating?

All I’ve said there is fact. I was preparing to perform A&ESJ; in a few weeks’ time. I’m an amateur performer and occasional journalist. That MD has been misleading to me personally on a global news programme crosses the lines.

So it’s a fact that his chuckle was a result of his being nervous about the bell chiming on his “artistic license”? How do you know? Facts are funny things. I think it was wrong for Ira Glass to rake Mike Daisey over the coals the way he did. Glass made the journalistic mistake, not Daisey.

“maybe” is written quite clearly. I’ve also agreed with the critique of TAL. Not sure of your point.

My point is that “facts” are funny things and I think it was wrong for Ira Glass to rake Mike Daisey over the coals the way he did. Glass made the journalistic mistake, not Daisey. Glass’ sleight of hand has succeeded in getting you and many to question Daisey’s professionalism and ethics.

It’s fascinating to me how people are angry with Daisey even if they don’t believe that Glass’ actions are unimpeachable.  I think there’s this need to be on the right-good-just side of this debate, and Glass’ call to the value of objective truth seems to fit that need.  The irony is that people who say that objective truth should be the goal of all artists, reporters, and narrative journalists do so because it feels more right-good-just than acknowledging the subjectivity of truth.

I understand the issue with “objectivity” but people are not entitled to feel slighted (maybe not Glass but other audience members) by people who tell them stories they imply are events they experienced when they know they are not facts they experienced?  Particularly when they are telling them those facts with at least some goal of having the audience take action based on those experiences?  Isn’t that just a lie?

Yes, Daisey lied and TAL didn’t do their job. Had Glass just said it was a mistake, or clarified that Daisey’s work was a theatrical piece, that would’ve been enough. But he had to take it a step further by interrogating Daisey on the air. It wasn’t cool.

@Darin: Sure.  I get that.  And I’m disappointed with how Daisey seems to have fabricated the bit about the guards carrying guns (which seems to me the only real invention besides calling Cathy “Anna,” everything else being conflations and exaggerations).  But more than anything it leads me to wonder why he did it.  Is it because guns are a signifier for a Western audience?  What did he hope to achieve by giving the guards firearms?

What’s more, I also question Cathy’s account.  She has probably taken a lot of foreigners around to factories in the interim, and I imagine it’s hard to remember all the details of her time with Daisey.  I even wonder whether or not she was paid by the Marketplace reporter who had her to take him where she took Daisey.  And was Glass threatened by Apple in some way?  Is that why he retracted the January episode with an attack on Daisey instead of an apology of his own?

Glass calls out Daisey for not being transparent, but then he leaves a lot of questions both unasked and unanswered.  I still think Glass is more of a liar than Daisey.

Daisy doesn’t seem to be denying he lied about a number of facts—he’s not disputing he made a lot of it up.  Like meeting poisoned workers.  He admits he didn’t meet poisoned workers.  So he is saying that someone poisoned people, but he now admits he made that up.  That seems way over the line to me.  Regardless of whether its theater or journalism.

I guess I’m not really as concerned with whether Glass is a worse person than Daisy. As a listener, I feel more violated by Daisy. Its easy enough to tell people that your monologue is a mix of fiction and non-fiction.  That happens all the time and people value those contributions.  Trying to bring people to an emotion or conclusion by representing fiction as non-fiction seems deeply dishonest.  More importantly, its seems deeply unfair to the audience. 

Put more simply, the problem wasn’t that Daisey’s work was a theatrical piece, it was that Daisey himself was putting it forward as a non-fictional theatrical piece.  TAL didn’t put that spin on it, Daisey did.  I think that’s why he has admitted he was very stressed about the factual inaccuracies “coming out.”

Glass’s show is about perspectives.  Little of it comes from him.  Some contributors are fiction, some are non-fiction.  Some admit its a bit of both.  Glass doesn’t require objectivity or non-fiction, I think his frustration comes from the fact that Daisey put his monologue forward as a story built on facts he experienced.

My conclusion, though very fallible, is that he was passionate about influencing change with regard to how workers in China were treated and felt compelled to embellish or lie to achieve that end.  Its a temptation and experience that is as old as time itself.  I don’t think he necessarily cleanses himself of wrong by now hiding behind the cloak of theater.

I found this to be something that resonated with me:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/03/17/fabulous-journalism/

(this is one of the stories I took the admissions from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/17/mike-daisey-shortcuts-apple-factory-this-american-life_n_1355378.html)

One point we likely agree on—its silly for TAL to hold up the stories told on the show to “journalistic” standards.  Perception is a tricky thing and there often isn’t one “truth.”  But still, there is a difference between hearing a person’s story about how they experienced 9/11 (which may very well be influenced by a number of factors that make it different than someone watching the exact same events) or what they remember about witnessing a crime (eye witness testimony is notoriously unreliable despite the fact that the witnesses believe they are being absolutely accurate and truthful) and someone telling you about a crime they witnessed when they know they never actually witnessed a crime.

One last point, and I’ll stop hijacking your blog post!

The transcript is illuminating:
http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/TAL_460_Retraction_Transcript.pdf&pli=1

Again, I return to the poisoning story.  He acknowledges he made it up and that he actively chose not to tell the TAL producers at the time, when he knew they were asking him for fact checking purposes, and he justifies it by saying that telling the truth would “ruin” his story.  I can’t read that any other way than he understood that the audience was understanding his story as non-fiction, but he did not want to inform them otherwise, because it would ruin his narrative.  That to me seems condescending to the audience, but just fundamentally offensive.  Put into other contexts, contexts that are not as sympathetic, its just propaganda.

He acknowledges his goal was to make “people care.”  He chose not to reveal it was partially fictional because he was worried it would undermine that goal.  As a listener, that makes me feel violated.  I would feel the same if it was his monologue and not on TAL. There is plenty of valuable space for fiction in theater, and with fiction altering non-fiction.  I don’t really subscribe to the idea that theater is a valuable space for intentional lies intended to manipulate the audience into feeling something by luring them into thinking you are telling them actual facts.

@Darin: Daisey didn’t meet poisoned workers but those workers do exist.  It’s a lie; it’s a conflation.  Whatever.

I didn’t say that one of them was a worse person than the other, just that Glass is a bigger liar than Daisey.  You happen to think the opposite is true and that’s fine.

In the end, it seems like we’re operating in two different worldviews.  You question things only when you’re given reason to; I question things more often (maybe too often!) because I see truth as subjective. 

I’m fascinated by everyone’s motives for the things they do, and, in this case, I’m especially interested in Glass’ motives for dissecting Daisey’s behavior and not his own.  I don’t listen to This American Life regularly so I don’t know how little or much Glass normally chimes in with his perspectives.  That said, to pretend that his views aren’t present in every single episode is silly.  Glass curates what gets on the show: This American Life is all about Glass’ perspectives!

@Darin: Defining media as propaganda isn’t about whether or not the media lies.  Propaganda gives its audience an answer and doesn’t encourage thought.  Art asks questions.  Daisey’s work didn’t stop the questioning: it caused the questioning!

I respect your position.  I just don’t buy that art always just causes questions.  Framing questions is powerful.  Framing questions by providing facts shapes the questions that arise from it.  Its entirely possible for someone to use art intentionally to frame and shape the questions to lead to the answers it prefers.  In that sense, its no different than any form of expression.  So I guess I am just not willing to give him a pass because he was framing his questions in the context of a theater.  If he told me the same on the street, I’d be pissed that he lied to me.  Its intentional manipulation.

And I would very much disagree with your assertion that my worldview is one that questions things only when I’m given reason to.  I question things every day of my life.  I read, I think, I challenge myself, I reevaluate.  I expose myself to as many viewpoints as I can.  I work in a profession where the subjectivity of facts makes itself apparent on a daily basis.  I don’t necessarily know why you would characterize me that way.

But I return to the distinction I raised above.  There is a difference between the subjectivity of perception and experience and a person telling you something happened when they know it did not happen that way.  I don’t necessarily assume that people are not lying to me, but I do assume their perception is subjective and not infallible.  But I don’t assume that people are just telling me things as facts when they know they are not true.  At least not people I trust.  And when I find out they are telling me things as facts when they know they are not true, I stop trusting them.  Daisey did that.  I don’t find it more excusable because he’s an artist.

And saying he met workers who were poisoned is a lie.  Its not a conflation.  If he said “workers in Shenzen were poisoned” that would be a conflation.  He know he didn’t meet such people, yet he said it.  That matters.  For a lot of reasons.

@Darin: I didn’t mean that you don’t read, think, or challenge yourself.  I meant that perhaps you were more trusting of Daisey than I ever was, and maybe that is why you are more disappointed by him than I am.

Fair point.

This is what happens when things like St. Patrick’s Day keeps me from leaving the house.  I go around ranting and raving on people’s blogs.

Keep up the good work!

Glass says at the beginning of “Act One. Act Two.” of his January episode: “When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story onstage, when I left the theater, I had a lot of questions. 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.” 

I can’t help but feel like this anti-Daisey truth-frenzy that Glass has stirred up has something to do with Glass’ own guilty conscience.

I don’t understand why the fact that he is not a reporter means that he can lie and be excused from it because he cloaks himself in art.  Daisey represented his show as fact.  He knew that TAL was fact checking his story exactly to avoid what happened.  He participate in that fact checking process and knowingly mislead them in the process.  He know that TAL expected his segment to be fact, not fiction.  Instead of telling him to the contrary or saying what artists do all the time, that his act was a mix of fact and fiction, he chose to knowingly leave TAL with a false impression knowing that they would act on that.

Is TAL is guilty of negligence in not following up more?  That’s fair.  But Daisey mislead them and lied and had he not lied and mislead this never would have happened. 

I guess what I’m missing is the desire to pin Ira Glass to the wall.  He has never argued that truth is not subjective.  What he is arguing is that you shouldn’t tell people things happened and tell them it is your actual experience and confirm that it is not fiction.  That is what Daisey did.

Ira Glass was neglient.  Daisey was an active liar.  He took them both down with him.  I don’t see why Glass is more morally culpable in that situation.

@Darin: Glass presents himself in “Retraction” as someone who cares deeply and even dogmatically about objective truth.  Daisey doesn’t do that, so when Daisey lies it doesn’t feel like hypocrisy. 

I lie in my work, something that I talk about here a bit and in greater depth here.  I’m honest about the fact that I lie in the sense that I’ve now vlogged and written about it, but before that was I lying to you?  Or did the context of art excuse my lies for you?  Does my portrait of you make you mad?

First, with regard to Glass, I think it would require a complete disregard of what TAL actually does to conclude that he has a dogmatic belief in “ojbective truth.”  The show is filled with fiction, fiction/non-fiction hybrids via people like David Sedaris, and non-fiction.  His retraction is based on representing something as someone’s story of what they perceived that turned out to be something they did not actually perceive.  In that context, he felt like he misrepresented the segment to his audience. He did that based on misrepresentations by Daisey.

You say Daisey doesn’t purport to believe in any objective truth, but he certainly represented himself as such.  He knew that TAL was fact checking his story and he knew that they insisted that everything he put in the piece be true.  And lets not play semantics games.  By true, I mean when he says “I saw a goat,” he means he believe he saw a goat.  Maybe he actually saw a big dog or it was a figment of his imagination, but its true in the sense that he actually believes it to be true.

As for your definition of “lie,” I’m not really buying it.  If Mike Daisey has a one man show and tells his story, he’s not necessarily representing it as fiction or non-fiction.  When he presents his show via a third party who asks for her assurance that he is being accurate and he gives that assurance and tries to evade detection that he is not, that is different.  Primarily because he knowingly caused Glass and TAL to represent it as such.

I’m not sure where you draw the line in terms of art excusing all dishonesty.  Could someone write a book actively purporting to be non-fiction that described in great detail their witnessing of child abuse by certain individuals knowing that they actually never witnessed it.  Would it be sufficient that they suspected it so thought it achieved a larger goal by doing it?  Or would it suffice that the questions raised by the deception justified the means in that people started talking about child abuse more?  Would your evaluation of the propriety of that change if they were upfront that it was a mix of fiction and non-fiction?  Or can we just excuse it based on our larger belief in the subjectivity of truth?  What if someone authored a piece in a newspaper, in the news section, doing the same?

What if I, feeling strongly about the otherwise horrible character of another person, wrote a purportedly non-fiction book about that person accusing them of committing crimes that I witnessed.  Is that excused by the subjectivity of truth?  Is it excused by the underlying motives or message I was trying to convey?  Or the questions I was trying to raise amongst my readers?

Daisey’s crime wasn’t having a one man show that mixed fiction and non-fiction.  Or that his perception of things differed from other people.  Its that he knowingly told other people he saw things that he didn’t and let other people represent his story as the same.  If you are going to tell people what you are telling them is non-fiction, you have a duty to do it honestly.  Otherwise you are just defrauding your listener. 

In my mind, its the difference between you doing a portrait (that is your perception of truth) and you selling a painting as one you did when you know that someone else actually did it.

One other point re TAL.  I believe its fundamentally the opposite of a dogmatic belief in objective truth.  The entire theme of the show is people’s different perspectives on common themes or often on the same event or fact.  The show itself is an embrace of the different ways in which we all perceive the world.

One can believe all that and still believe that a person telling the world that they saw X when they know they never saw X and they know that people understand that they meant they saw X is not fair to the listener.

They both messed up, but then Glass took Daisey down in such a way that Glass would remain standing. Glass is also a storyteller, and it was he who framed the retraction. People don’t seem to notice that.

@Darin: I didn’t say that This American Life is dogmatically about objective truth all the time.  I said: “Glass presents himself in ‘Retraction’ as someone who cares deeply and even dogmatically about objective truth.”  Isn’t it fascinating how easy it is to misunderstand someone even when you’re reading their words?

You’re right: the intersection of art and truth is murky.  The idea of truth has a powerful hold over us—it’s the source of the faux memoir trend and the reason for “based on true story” prefacing certain movies.  Daisey and lots of artists, including me, knowingly manipulate the truth in our work.  Sometimes we do it more gracefully than others; sometimes we cross lines for some people.  Still, I believe we’re making the world better as we do it.

I don’t think you and I are going to come to some kind of agreement.  You forcefully believe that people should tell the truth.  I believe it too and I hate being lied to.  At the same time, I see lies and half-truths everywhere in our world, and an artist lying like Daisey did is a lot more acceptable to me than the way corporations lie to me daily in advertisements. 

My worldview is uncomfortably relative—uncomfortable for you I’m guessing, and certainly uncomfortable for me—but it’s where I’m at.  Your insistence on your version of right and wrong, while interesting to me, is not going to change my mind.

We will agree to disagree.

My goal wasn’t to change your mind—I wouldn’t pretend to be so persuasive—but just to offer a different perspective.

The idea that differences in perception, or storytelling the blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction are the same as differences in intentionally telling someone something you know is not true (all being lumped together as “lies”) where that intentional misstatement is designed to achieve an end (here, action by the audience aimed at Apple) seems to me to be a dangerous concept.  It works fine in the context of a Daisey, who is sympathetic.  Its less comfortable in the context of people who use tactics like that to mislead and deceive people to achieve the speaker’s ends in less sympathetic ways.  Whether its the state through controlled media, by individuals/“news outlets” in the political sphere, or artists with political or social policy ends. 

Just a different view.  I respect your position.

I don’t agree with it, but I found it to be compelling and thought both you and David would appreciate it:
http://gawker.com/5894913/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-larger-truth-this-american-lifes-rich-history-of-embellishment

Just read that. Thanks for the link!