So, this weekend the worm turned and now it's time for the world to rise up in arms against David Sedaris. If by arms we mean "strongly worded media insider blog posts and tweets" and by world we mean "obsessive guardians of media orthodoxy with time on their hands now that the Lena Dunham thing is in remission". 

Even the WaPo article that set off this "firestorm" has a hard time finding anyone who gives a shit about this, and you know Eric Farhi was calling far and wide to get the incensed comments needed to start this fire. Okay, maybe "incensed" was never going to happen—for an argument like this apparently all you need is media's new horrified buzzword: BLURRY LINES. 

BLURRY LINES is the new watchword, presumably because in a more perfect world none of our lines would ever be blurry, and that would solve the deep, entrenched problems in our media.

Except it doesn't. If people actually gave a sincere shit about BLURRY LINES, we'd be talking about FOX News. But media pundits get tired of talking about FOX News because it never goes anywhere, because FOX News is a massive corporation who frankly doesn't give a shit about these pundits, and ignores them. And humans hate being ignored.

So instead of doing the hard work of chipping away at real media injustices, it's easier to find an individual, who are always less armored than corporations are, and shit on them, because then you can make your points and pretend that you moved the needle. And the left has never tired of policing its own—a pattern we see again and again, as I write these words in a cellar bar in Prague—so why not see if we can get Sedaris fact-checked?

First, no-one is upset with Mr. Sedaris' work. NO ONE. No one is listening to SANTALAND DIARIES and then saying to themselves, "I am now informed about the true nature of Macy's elf policies from the early nineties, which is good as I am writing a PhD thesis on that very subject." No one is calling NPR complaining that they were terribly tricked by Mr. Sedaris' feelings about the pleasures of smoking, or cutlery, or whatever the fuck it is that David is talking about. No one cares what is factually accurate in the details of what his aunt said to him in his childhood, except maybe his family members, and they should be fucking used to it by now.

Second, this is about me, not David Sedaris. It's about what I did on TAL, and how everyone, including me, agrees it was unethical. We've had an entire hour of TAL dedicated to retracting that episode, and then hundreds of articles across the world wherein every last person who writes for a newspaper agreed that my actions violated journalistic trust. I've been open with the media and spoken publicly repeatedly about my actions, and I've apologized fully and completely for those whose trust I've breached. I haven't vanished, I'm right here, and I'm accountable for the decisions I have made.

You want to talk about that some more, fine. But it's mine. It's not the vanguard of some "movement", like one of those NYT Style section pieces where we've found two instances of something and now there is a "trend". It's not an excuse for media watchdogs to clamp down as though they are protecting the public from stories as though they need their food chewed for them.

None of this gives anyone the right to go headhunting for someone else who did *nothing* I have done, who has been open and clear in his work, and with whom no one has an argument. It's despicable. Just because you can't find any more meat on my bones in this matter doesn't allow you the right to hunt someone else. 

Leave David Sedaris the fuck alone.

NPR Frets About David Sedaris and It Is Mike Daisey's Fault

This is the problem with “This American Life” — it has conditioned listeners to accept creative nonfiction as a journalistic-ish mode of storytelling. Perhaps it should simply embrace the blurring that goes on in creative nonfiction and state that clearly to its audience.

Financial Times of London Review:

What is undeniable is Daisey’s huge energy and immaculate comic timing. He delivers his monologue sitting at a table under a spotlight, his only props some notes and a glass of water: it’s an intense experience, often funny and sometimes very moving.

Few people believe Daisey was right to mislead his audiences; the issue, how our heedless choices affect tens of thousands of factory workers, is too important. But what those who gave Daisey a standing ovation at HighTide were applauding, I think, was his ability to speak to their consciences, to open their eyes. His monologue is a piece of theatre unlike any other I’ve experienced – like HighTide’s programming, it’s not flawless, but it is brave.

Ira Today:

“My attitude has always been that the audience is sophisticated enough to know the difference between someone who’s on the show to be funny and the actual reporting, where we go into the field and do interviews and very rigorously try to define what is happening in a traditional journalistic way.”

He pauses, then adds that he has asked Sedaris if his stories are true, and the humorist always answers: “They are true enough for you.”

These translations from around the world are wild. Here's the opening of scene two from TATESJ in Portugeuse: " Meu único hobby é tecnologia. Eu amo tecnologia, amo tudo sobre ela. Eu amo olhar tecnologia, eu amo comparar uma peça de tecnologia com outra, eu amo ler os rumores sobre a tecnologia que ainda não existe, eu amo pesquisar tecnologia, eu amo comprar tecnologia, eu amo abrir tecnologia - mesmo quando está embrulhada naquele plástico bolha - eu amo. Eu amo o cheiro de uma nova peça de tecnologia - aquela espécie de cheiro de PVC queimado quando você liga na eletricidade pela primeira vez? - Eu amo isso. "

Why All the Smashy-Smashy? A Beginner's Guide to Targeted Property Destruction. | Slog:

But first, let's clear something up: Reporters today on KOMO and Slog and beyond have made the mistake of calling today's targeted property destruction "violence." There is an enormous moral distinction between smashing a bank window and smashing a person. Lumping the two under the umbrella of "violence" is linguistically lazy and politically irresponsible. It is worth noting that in the dramatic property-destruction campaigns of groups like the Earth Liberation Front—burning SUV lots, ski lodges, and in one of their stupider and more infamous moments, a botanical research facility at the UW—people don't get hurt.

In fact, the only "violence" I saw today, aside from some minor pushing back and forth between protesters and police and some pepper spray, was a guy in a tie who was (understandably) pissed off when someone broke the rear window of his car. He chased down a protester and they both fell down in the street and had a minor scuffle. That was violence (however paltry). Smashing a window is not violence, it's vandalism. There is a difference—unless you think of people as the moral equivalent of property.

‎"Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond with the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Some times you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost." —Harold Pinter

NATO vs. Rogues? - IPS:

The controversy over Mike Daisey’s one-man performance highlighting the abuses of workers at Apple subcontractors in China continues to rage in blogs and the media world. FPIF columnist Hannah Gurman weighs in this week with her own recommendation: focus on what Daisey got right.

“Journalistic accountability is indeed important,” she writes in True Lies about Apple and Foxconn. “However, at a certain point, scrutinizing Daisey’s practice becomes myopic and even absurd. By all accounts, virtually everything Daisey said was true insofar as the things he described do actually occur in factories all over China. By focusing on narrow rules of journalistic accountability, this controversy seemed to lose sight of these larger truths. Questions about Daisey’s accountability threatened to displace the larger issues of corporate accountability, creating a gigantic loophole through which Apple/Foxconn might easily escape.”

The Public Reviews » WHAT’S HOT – 30th APRIL 2012:

The sixth HighTide Festival pitches up this weekend in Suffolk. The big talking point will be Mike Daisey’s controversial depiction of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, but others to watch out for include Ella Hickson’s new play Boys, which is due to transfer to the Soho Theatre, and Mudlarks, a stark debut play about a lost generation. The festival is also hosting a series and Q&A’s with figures such as Juliet Stevenson and Griff Rhys Jones.

Impressive art from a Toronto production of AGONY/ECSTASY happening this May:



Artwork is by Chloe Chushman. This version of the show is called

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS
(and the Repudiation and Redemption of Mike Daisey)

and will be performed at secret locations around Toronto by Outside the March this May.

Details

Critics At Large: Agony over the Script, Ecstasy over the Performance: Halifax's Shakespeare by the Sea’s production of Mike Daisey’s Steve Jobs:

Discussions of metaphor are an important part of the play – phrases such as “if you control the metaphor, you control the world” and “shifting the metaphor” are frequently used to describe Steve Job’s monopolistic approach to selling Apple products. I wonder if Daisey purposefully repeats the concept of metaphor as a mimetic comment, a clue to the audience that his China trip is simply a vehicle to convey his message, not the message itself. Perhaps I give him too much credit, but it seems like Daisey’s critics are sweating the small stuff for a play that raises so many more important issues.

We used to never hear these stories. Now, we do.

Foxconn Workers Protest Wages, Threaten To Jump Off Roof:

Workers at a Chinese factory owned by Foxconn, Apple Inc's main manufacturer, threatened to jump off the roof of a building in a protest over wages just a month after the two firms announced a landmark agreement on improving working conditions.

The protest happened in the central city of Wuhan at one of Foxconn's plants. The company employ some 1.2 million workers in China assembling iPhones and iPads, among other products.

It involved some 200 workers, the Hong-Kong based activist group Information Centre for Human Rights said.

Looking For The Line Between The Truth And A Lie:

I confess to having a similarly tolerant attitude to Mike Daisey, the performance artist whose This American Life monologue about his visits to factories in China where Apple products are produced turned out to have had factual inaccuracies. Ira Glass, whose radio show This American Life works more as a story telling hour than a news show, was horrified to learn that one of his storytellers had taken factual liberties. His outrage seems inappropriate and silly to me.

There are different standards for different kinds of story telling, different kinds of nonfiction. And anyway, none of Daisey's errors have any bearing on the importance of his central assertion: that consumers should be aware of and care about the working conditions in China's high-technology factories. There's two sides to this question, of course. But they don't really turn on the sort of factual mistakes or distortions (which were they?) made by Daisey.

I saw a movie the other day; it began with a text screen: "This is based on a true story. Only the facts have been changed." Sometimes, it seems to me, that gets it about right.

Mike Daisey’s bigger point - New News | Latest News | Current Events | World News | Politics & Top Online Magazine:

Labor abuse in China is hardly confined to Apple’s supplier, Foxconn. It is widespread. In some ways, the working conditions in foreign-invested factories such as Foxconn is better than that of domestic factories. Compared with workers in large foreign-invested factories, workers in domestic factories often encounter delayed payment of wages, lack of safety measures and no health care. In an incident in 2003, Chinese Premier Wen Jiaboa helped a migrant worker reclaim her overdue wage from her employer. To date, unpaid and delayed wages remain one of the most serious problems for migrant workers.

Outside of factories, workers such as miners or construction laborers fare even worse since they forgo written employment contracts and face substandard working conditions. In the event of injuries or wages withheld, they cannot even file for legal protections.
China has about 153 million migrant workers. According to a 2006 nationwide survey conducted by the government, 86% of them work more than 8 hours every day and more than half of them cannot receive their monthly wages on time. A study from an academic group last year shows that these conditions have not improved.

Of course, Chinese workers have not suffered in silence. Wage disputes are on the rise. So has the number of distraught workers who threaten to jump from the top of factory buildings or skyscrapers that they have just built.

The plight of Chinese workers is rooted in the skewed power relations between business and labor. In the 1980s and 1990s, local governments often colluded with businesses to keep down labor costs. In the past decade under President Hu Jintao, the government has sought to improve conditions for laborers. A labor contract law was enacted and overt discrimination against migrant workers was lifted. But they are not enough.

Migrant workers with little experience or few connections are in a very weak position in large cities. They often take whatever job is available just so that they can survive. Businesses, on the other hand, incur little or no cost when they engage in unfair labor practice. Many existing laws are only good on paper, and businesses face no severe penalty for flouting them. In a country where the government often considers a partial recovery of overdue wages as a success, it’s an upward battle for workers.

Despite a more tolerant attitude by the government toward labor protests in recent years, no channel exists to translate that into political energy for change. The Chinese government outlaws independent unions so that workers cannot organize or strike collectively. Even if workers have the advantage of people power of their side, they are simply not on par with businesses in terms of political clout.

In this context, the spotlight on China’s labor problem raised by Daisey and others is important. If multinational corporations follow high standards in their home countries, they should abide by similar rules abroad. And if more of them follow Apple’s example in allowing independent groups to inspect their suppliers’ labor practice, it will go a long way to helping Chinese workers. Improving conditions in factories such as those owned by Foxconn will affect China’s labor market as a whole and help workers gain bargaining power in dealing with domestic factories.

We hope that with continued international attention on the plight of Chinese workers, the government eventually will enact meaningful reform that will guarantee workers basic labor rights.

At 85, Robert Brustein looks back and ahead - Arts - The Boston Globe:

Q. This is kind of a sweeping question, but I know you’re capable of a sweeping answer, so I’ll just ask you to give me your appraisal of the current state of American theater.

A. I’ll give you a sweeping statement, and regret it the moment after I say it. [Laughs] I think the American theater reflects America now, as everything that happens is beginning to reflect America — one-percent America. The fact is that our values have somehow gotten very skewed, and we’ve gone back — if we ever left it — to the notion that success is the highest value in this country. Not integrity, not quality, not intelligence, not spirit, not soul. Success, financial success. And this is a heartbreaker because this country was unlike any country, with the possible exception of ancient Greece; it had the chance to approach an ideal state, and it’s gone. We’ve lost it. Success seems to be the one criterion of achievement.

The Agony and The Ecstasy of Mike Daisey:

The factual revelations in the last few months about Apple's abhorrent manufacturing practices have made people incredibly uncomfortable. We do not want to believe that we have contributed directly or indirectly to the oppression of others in the creation of our gadgets. This backlash against Mr. Daisey has less to do with debating the obligations of storytellers and more to do with our desperate search for a way to force Apple's worms back into the can and pretend they never existed.

In the last few weeks, Chris Hayes has had both Mr. Daisey on his MSNBC weekend program as well as actor and playwright Wallace Shawn to discuss his play “The Fever”. This is no accident. Mr. Hayes is rightfully bringing an issue into the fore that we struggle to keep hidden away: how are our possessions made and what responsibility do we have to ensure they are done so safely and fairly?

This is a question with which I have struggled ever since reading Mr. Shawn’s play over a decade ago. And I still fail at this. Even knowing about Apple’s practices, I use an iPhone, a Macbook Pro and I’m typing this on my iMac. And that’s only one organization.

Consider how with each passing year more and more of our work is outsourced, robbing our citizens of much needed jobs and allowing us such physical distance from the locations in which our things are produced that we ignore the blood, sweat and tears of those who make them.

Whatever you think of Mr. Daisey’s cry, I can assure you that the wolf exists.

Official Map Now Shows "First Amendment Area" For OWS At Federal Hall: Gothamist:

Aw, how sweet of the National Park Service to set up a little "First Amendment Rights Area" on the steps of Federal Hall! This new map on the official website shows how the Park police are doing their best to accommodate our nation's annoying "free speech" laws. Do you have a political opinion that you want to express? Just keep your lips sealed until you are securely stationed behind the barricades, then rant to your heart's content! (Any loud free speech after nightfall, however, will not be tolerated.)

Earlier this week we reported that the NYPD had set up barricades dividing the steps into a space for tourists and a space for Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. Now, for the time being at least, the National Park Service has made it official, with a designated First Amendment Rights Zone. According to one protester, the NYPD is "preventing the public from interacting with protesters in the 'freedom cage' at Federal Hall." In order to be fair, they're now going to have to set up a Second Amendment cage for the Tea Party (preferably one with a firing range).

What is Given: Against Knowingly Changing the Truth « BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog:

Jill Talbot ends with a lyric, lovely paragraph in which she explores an evening where the shadows of trees on the snow unsettled her, and explores why she had written earlier that it was the tree branches themselves. And then she quotes Mark Slouka:

There is no map–read as you may, write what you will.

The difference here? For me, there is a map. The map can’t be drawn, but it can be expressed in words:

You work with what is given to you. You arrange the puzzle pieces taken from the nonfiction box without reaching over into the fiction box, as tempting as it may be. You do your best to pull up honest memory. Though we know memory’s weakness, at least don’t lie about what you think you remember. When you are not sure, you tell the reader. When you want to change something, explore why you want to change it. Fiction approaches a certain sort of truth, and thank goodness we have fiction, but it is not the same truth that nonfiction attempts. Know the difference. As a nonfiction writer, you will surely make mistakes, get things wrong, remember poorly, but to do it knowingly, that’s crossing the line.

Thanks for listening, Jill. Let us all discuss.

Ruth Franklin: Some Works Of Art Can’t Be Labeled As Fact Or Fiction, And That’s OK | The New Republic:

But here’s where it gets tricky. Because Daisey, for the most part, isn’t actually a fabricator—one who makes up stories out of whole cloth. (Is that why they’re called fabricators?) His monologue describes a trip that he actually made to Shenzhen, the Chinese city where Foxconn and other Apple suppliers are headquartered. He did personally interview workers there, as well as gain access to the factories by pretending to be a visiting businessman. In some cases, he claims that he essentially made composites by rearranging the chronology of his trip or otherwise changing the details of characters. In others, he seems to have relied on other people’s reporting and presented it as his own. But very little—and this is important—seems actually to be untrue. Does it matter that the workers’ dormitories have cameras in the hallways, as Daisey correctly reports, but not in the workers’ bedrooms, as he also claims? Or that he visited only three factories rather than the ten he claimed to have seen? No one disputes that he got the basics of the story right: Foxconn’s deplorable treatment of its employees.

Ira Glass knows all this, which is why his “Gotcha!” attitude seems a little off. It’s clear that he feels personally aggrieved by Daisey: Not only did he suffer an embarrassment to the journalistic standards of his radio program, but he himself was taken in by Daisey’s stage show. “I thought it was literally true, seeing it in the theater,” he harangues Daisey. “I thought it was true because you were onstage saying ‘These things happened to me.’” But what Glass ignores—and Daisey is right to protest about this—is that the theater, like the novel, operates by different rules than journalism does. Glass seems to have forgotten that the character onstage called “Mike Daisey” isn’t Daisey, exactly; it’s his dramatic persona. For the most part, we don’t take it literally when a poet speaks in the first person; we know that there is a gap between the speaker of the poem and the poet as an individual. The rules are similar for a dramatic monologuist like Daisey, and Glass is being more than a little naïve in his insistence on melding Daisey’s art to Daisey’s life.

Glass concludes that “honest labeling” is what’s called for, insisting that Daisey’s monologue ought to have been marked as a work of fiction. But it’s hard to say how Daisey might have labeled his work more honestly: It was performed in a theater, after all, not recorded and presented as a documentary film or a news report. And Daisey is right to insist that “fiction” is no more accurate a label for his work than “journalism”; like John D’Agata’s essays, it contains something of each. “I’m tired of this genre being terrorized by an unsophisticated reading public that’s afraid of venturing into terrain that can’t be footnoted and verified by seventeen different sources,” D’Agata complains, and though he doesn’t specify what “this genre” is, it’s clear that he aims for a more capacious definition of non-fiction than the fact-checker’s.

The Self-Made Man: How Stephen Elliott Writes His Life - Ashwin Seshagiri - Entertainment - The Atlantic:

Critics, including his father, have drawn parallels to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, the memoir of addiction that landed on Oprah's book club. The book later drew controversy when it was discovered to be largely fictionalized.

As long as people have been telling stories of the past, there has been a tension between what people remember and what really occurred. This American Life listeners were reminded of that after Mike Daisey's story of the Foxconn factory in China. For Elliott, who uses fiction to explore the material of his own memories, this tension is exaggerated by the shocking nature of his work and the frequency with which he so openly talks about the traumatic events of his childhood. The tension is further magnified each time his father disputes one his stories.

"I don't know the year or make of the car," Elliott responded when asked again about the time his dad taught him how to drive. "That's not important. There's a handful of facts in the world, but they are dwarfed by interpretation and memory. A lie requires intent. "

Warren Ellis » GUEST INFORMANT: Laurie Penny:

You’ll have gathered by now that I hold no truck with the notion of ‘objective’ reporting – the idea that there is any such thing in a world where Fox News and the Daily Mail are considered serious press outlets seems to me too ridiculous to seriously countenance. To my mind the best one can ever do as a writer is be honest about your background and partialities and try to understand how they affect your outlook, to do violence to your own cliches, to practice compassion over caricature.

That’s what I’ve tried to do, whilst learning on the job, where practical skills – how to take quotes properly, how to wriggle around libel laws – count for no more or less than emotional skills, like scoring out a line between propaganda and cowardice that you can walk along in good conscience and then, whatever the insults and death threats and character assassinations thrown at you from either side, continuing to put one goddamned foot in front of the other. The best journalists I know have found a way to walk their own line. But for some of us that postion comes with a cost. My friend Natasha Lennard lost her job as a stringer at the New York times simply for being honest about her political affiliations, and responded bravely by declaring that she had no interest in producing that sort of objective journalism anyway.

‘This American Life’ retracts its exposé of Apple. But all’s still not well in China. - The Washington Post:

But how much does this kerfluffle affect what we actually know about labor conditions in China? Let’s hear what Rob Schmitz, the Marketplace reporter who first caught Daisey’s fabrications, has to say: “What makes this a little complicated is that the things Daisey lied about seeing are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by Hexane. Apple’s own audits show that 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.”

Indeed, the media spotlight on companies like Foxconn has prompted Apple to hire an independent auditor for its Chinese suppliers, although, according to Schmitz, it will take some time to determine whether conditions actually improve or not.

No ’Bully’ for You :: EDGE on the Net:

In 2007, a handful of chaperones brought a group of pubic school kids visiting from California to the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend a monologue by Mike Daisey, who works semi-improvisationally from a set of notes and twines together diverse narrative, historical, and philosophical threads into a braided whole that informs and illuminates. Because of Daisey’s style, his shows are a little different at each performance. Most people would call that art and understand that there’s a higher intention at work when Daisey is on stage. But when Daisey used the f-word, the kids’ chaperones (who described themselves as coming from "a Christian community") promptly gathered up their youthful flock and stampeded out of the auditorium. One of them paused along the way to trespass on the stage and pour his bottle of water over Daisey’s notes, an act of vandalism that destroyed the artist’s carefully prepared source material.

The incident made the news, of course, and the statement from the group that had taken such offense was that they had felt a need to get the kids to "safety" once the word "fuck" cropped up in Daisey’s performance. Exactly how, and why, the kids were in danger (Physical? Mental? Were they going to go blind?) from hearing a vulgar, but commonplace, word was a topic not touched up in the official explanation. Nor was any clarification forthcoming as to why the sight of one of these offended guardians of the youth vandalizing Daisey’s property constituted an increase in anyone’s "safety."

Wall Street Occupation Shifts From Parks To Sidewalks Near Stock Exchange: Gothamist:

For the past four nights, protesters affiliated with Occupy Wall Street have camped out on sidewalks near the New York Stock Exchange, sleeping outside banks and handing out literature to financial district workers by day. Why hasn't the NYPD swept in and crushed this dangerous nonviolent political demonstration? It seems Bloomberg's army may be stymied (for now, at least) by a 2000 court ruling upholding protesters' right to sleep on the sidewalk for political purposes, provided they don't take up more than half the sidewalk.

Justin Wedes, a spokesperson for Occupy Wall Street, tells us, "We are bringing the truth about inequity in this country to the belly of the beast, so that the 1%—and the many 99%'ers—who live and work on Wall Street can see what Wall Street's agenda of greed and corruption has done to Main Street."

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

~SB

Christian Lorentzen · Fact-checking · LRB 5 April 2012:

I miss New York sometimes, but I don’t miss its schizophrenic obsession with facts, or the puritan hysteria that attends the discovery that a memoir should have been called a novel or that someone saying something silly in a newspaper story turns out to be as real as Huck Finn. The zealotry of the shaming has a lot to do with journalists’ anxiety about their own influence as purveyors of fact. They can try for years and fail to stir people up about a foreign warlord the way a viral video like Kony 2012 has been able to do. And they can’t get people to feel bad about Chinese working conditions the way Mike Daisey has done in his Off-Broadway show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Star Wars Modern: What Mike Daisey Did Wasn't Fair - It Was Right.:

So when I found out that one of my favorite episodes of This American Life turned out not to be true I didn't care. Not at all, not one iota. I understood that the author had presented the story as fact, had urged his listeners to check his facts, but that he had lied. It was a great story, while it cast doubt on the practices of an well regarded company, and cast doubt on the enterprise of journalism itself, it in no way made me think less of the author, TAL, or The Washington Post.

I still love Malcolm Gladwell even though I now know he lied throughout the story TAL broadcast. My lack of outrage is because when I listen to TAL I don't expect "All The News That's Fit to Print," I expect something closer to the way TAL describes itself: “It's mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always.”

So while I was surprised and disappointed to learn that Mike Daisey had lied about the narrative TAL had broadcast - I was just as surprised, that by doing so, he had somehow besmirched TAL's journalistic credibility. When did Ira Glass graduate from being a talk radio Casey Kasem to NPR's Dan Rather?

Ought You To Know? « Emily Magazine:

Taking everything super personally remains my métier. Lately, however, I have begun to doubt its effectiveness as an activist strategy. I still believe with all my heart that the personal is political, that privacy is a patriarchal construct designed to keep women from telling the truth about their circumstances, and that “when a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” And I also think anger can be a powerful engine of action and change. But finally I’m realizing that walking around all the time feeling overwhelmed with anger and jealousy can interfere with your ability and your will to tell the entire truth, in ways than my 12 year old self could never have imagined.

MSNBC's Up With Chris Hayes Raises Level of Discussion on Cable News | The Philly Post:

The show’s shining moment may be Hayes’s response to the Mike Daisey/This American Life controversy. Daisey appeared on Up just a week or two before the scandal arose over the inaccuracies in his piece for the radio program on Chinese Apple factories.

On the following week’s show, Hayes delivered an amazing response in which he both admonished Daisey for lying and held up parts of Daisey’s monologue as powerful and important.