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Mr. Daisey Goes To The Apple Factory

March 28, 2012 by · Comments Off on Mr. Daisey Goes To The Apple Factory 

Mr. Daisey Goes To The Apple Factory, Mike Daisy: “I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard” Remember the story, posted on This American Life about the Apple Mac factory in China, that went viral earlier this year? Well it turns out it wasn’t entirely true. The story, which was titled ‘Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory’, was written by American monologist, author, and actor, Mike Daisy, and the description read:

Mike Daisey was a self-described “worshipper in the cult of Mac.” Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: who makes all my crap? He travelled to China to find out.

Daisy has been performing the story as a spoken monologue in theatres for 2 years under the name ‘The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’.

A few months later Rob Schmitz, a Shanghai-based reporter, noticed a number of discrepancies in the story and he contacted This American Life with his findings.

Below are some of the discrepancies Schmitz found in ‘Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory’

He mentions that an illegal union had been set up where the workers would meet up at coffee houses and Starbucks to talk. Starbucks is pricier in China then the US. Workers on $15-$20 a day could not afford it.
They then tracked down his translator, Cathy – she points out a lot of things that were wrong.
They use a special cleaning chemical called hexane that dries quicker than alcohol; it has hallucinogenic properties that make all the workers high and shaky – none of the workers were like that.

Workers from a different factory had experienced poisoning from the chemical, but Daisey had used it to exaggerate his story.

Factory security guards were carrying guns – only military and police are allowed guns in China.
He tells a sympathy story about an old man who was fired after his hand was injured in an accident – Cathy mentions that this never happened.

This American Life

March 16, 2012 by · Comments Off on This American Life 

This American Life, The weekly public radio program “This American Life” said on Friday that it was retracting a story about Apple’s suppliers in China because of falsehoods in it, exposing tensions between journalism, storytelling and theater.

The story by Mike Daisey, originally broadcast on Jan. 6, was an adaptation of his one-man theatrical show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which dramatically conveys and condemns the working conditions at Foxconn, a factory in China where Apple products are made. The episode became the most popular podcast in the history of the program, the show said on Friday.

In the staged performance and in the radio excerpt from it, Mr. Daisey describes meeting mistreated Foxconn workers, relying on a translator to carry on the conversation. But in a later interview with Rob Schmitz, a correspondent for another radio program, Marketplace, the interpreter who traveled with Mr. Daisey disputed some of the details of the meetings, suggesting that Mr. Daisey did not witness what he said he did.

The disparities will be explained in detail this weekend on “This American Life,” which will devote its entire hour to the retraction and the explanation.

On the program, Mr. Schmitz says: “What makes this a little complicated is that the things Daisey lied about are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by hexane. Apple’s own audits show the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers. These things are rare, but together, they form an easy-to-understand narrative about Apple.”

This American Life

March 13, 2010 by · Comments Off on This American Life 

This American LifeThis American Life:My dear friend Luke Davis will be the opening story on the radio is always interesting to the public and show that life in America tomorrow morning (Saturday, March 13th). Luke is the writer, whose book Kandy had become a movie starring Heath Ledger. According to Luke, the subject of tomorrow’s show is “save the day.” As he explains, “It’s amazing this story when I was eleven, and went with the man who was bitten by a snake, a sequence of events that have taken that.” For more information on the stations and times, go here.?

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