Julian Sanchez -- Research Fellow, Cato Institute
Like many folks who had seen and been moved by Mike Daisey's powerful monologue "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," I was profoundly disappointed by the recent revelation that he had not only fabricated some of the work's key scenes, but lied to the journalists and fact checkers at This American Life to prevent them from discovering the deception. There's no point, at this stage, in adding another condemnation to the chorus, but I do want to highlight a pair of sharp pieces by Slate's Daniel Engberger and The Economist's Erica Grieder, responding to the common claim that Daisey's narrative was, as the saying goes, "fake but accurate."
While most commentary on the story has rightly rejected Daisey's invocation of "artistic license" to excuse the use of falsified anecdotes in a work of purported nonfiction, much of it includes the obligatory caveat that Daisey's larger point, the essential picture he paints of labor practices at Chinese suppliers like Foxconn, is true. So, for instance, in his performance, Daisey recounts how in a few hours of interviews outside just a couple of Foxconn plants, he encountered numerous underage workers--girls as young as 12 and 13 years old. Under pressure, he retreated to the claim that he'd spoken (in English) with one girl who identified herself as being 13, and seen several others who "looked young." The translator who accompanied Daisey on these interviews--the one he'd lied to prevent journalists from contacting--denies that there was even the one, and insists that she'd remember if there had been. Now, you don't get a gig as an English translator in China without staying on the good side of the Chinese government, so she might have her own incentive to downplay anything that reflects badly on the labor situation there--but all things considered, I'm inclined to agree with Ira Glass that her account comes across as much more credible than Daisey's.
Suppose we think Daisey probably did just make up this encounter. It's still undeniably the case that there have been underage workers employed by Apple suppliers: The company itself reports identifying 91 in an audit conducted in 2010, the year Daisey visited China. Thus, some argue, even if Daisey lied, the more important thing is that his dramatization reflected the underlying truth in an emotionally resonant way.
I agree with Engberger and Grieder that this line of argument is wrong, and that Daisey's pseudo-anecdote is substantively misleading when you consider what it's really meant to show. Nobody disputes that the number of underaged workers employed by Apple suppliers is greater than zero. But in the context of Foxconn's 300,000-strong workforce, in a country where (as the report suggests) parents are willing to procure fake IDs to help children obtain a coveted factory job, it's also probably not realistic to expect that this would never happen. The real question is whether Apple is making a good faith effort to enforce some screening procedures, identify and correct failures in the process when they occur, and so on.
Daisey's anecdote implicitly makes the far stronger claim that Apple is egregiously, culpably negligent here: Child labor is so prevalent that you scarcely need audits to find cases. Rather, a visitor standing at the gates of any randomly selected factory for a few hours will readily encounter numerous 12- and 13-year old kids who don't seem the least bit concerned about openly acknowledging their ages. Under those circumstances, as Daisey suggests, it would be hard to believe Apple wasn't well aware of, and deliberately winking at, a systemic indifference to the law.
If the point of the monologue were just to provoke an emotional reaction in the audience, as an artistic end in itself, maybe this wouldn't matter. But the monologue is explicitly and forcefully pitched as a call to both consumer activism and political action. In that context, it actually matters what the magnitude of this problem is, relative to others we might focus our time and energy on, and whether Apple is being especially irresponsible, relative to any number of other companies I might give my money to instead.
Those of you who recall the headline are probably wondering what this could possibly have to do with the tragic case of Trayvon Martin. I'll outsource the full rundown to Mother Jones, but the quick version is this:
In itself, that's a matter of news judgment that could probably be defended. But I want to suggest that the disparity here may have something to do with whether one thinks institutional racism remains a serious problem in the United States. Conservatives often seem to think it isn't, and that if anything, the real problem is how often spurious charges of white racism are deployed by their political opponents, while liberals more often tend toward the opposite view. Maybe both groups are drawing justified inferences from the data they're seeing.
Like child labor, institutionalized racism -- in the form of quiet bias as opposed to overt proclamations of white supremacy -- can be hard to detect and quantify rigorously. In both cases, the people closest to the problem have strong incentives to obscure and deny it. So people tend to fall back on what psychologists call the Availability Heuristic, a rule of thumb that says the frequency of an event should correspond to how quickly you can think of examples of it. We automatically pluralize anecdotes into data. Like much of our cognitive toolkit, it often misfires in the age of modern media--it's why people tend to be irrationally concerned with extremely rare threats, like child abduction by strangers, that draw disproportionate media attention.
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The Anatomy of Media Bias: Trayvon Martin, Mike Daisey, and the Press