Saturn Smith's Open Salon Blog

"This American Life" offers Painful, Necessary Retraction

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 21:03:08 -0400

No kidding: The retraction broadcast (transcript in PDF) of This American Life's "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" story has some of the most uncomfortable, long silences I've recently heard. It's a squirm-worthy story, listening to host Ira Glass interview Mike Daisey about his fabrications. These fabrications largely concerned his own personal observations of Foxconn, an Apple supplier's factory, in China.

Up front: As a work of journalism, I find the retraction story pretty compelling. There's attention paid to one of the issues that I think is most often lost in stories like this: what's actually still true. In this case, quite a lot of the program is still true, and Glass brings on Charles Duhigg, half of a team of New York Times reporters who investigated Apple's suppliers in China, to discuss this.

The core of the piece, though, is a fascinating discussion about hard truth and its softer, more lenient cousin -- what I'd call "feels like" truth, where a reproduction and condensation of facts is mixed up to create something that seems likely enough to evoke a response. It turns out, hard truth is pretty easy to find in this case; nailing down the reasons for what's not true in Daisey's story is less easy.

This all combines to raise a very interesting question: Who can we trust? Should listeners of This American Life be more skeptical of their reporting from now on? Should they see this big, painful mea culpa as a reason to maintain their trust? What kind of changes will it force upon the show itself? TAL is, after all, a show that combines seductive (and sometimes reductive) stories with researched reporting to create reactions from its listeners. What standard should listeners expect from the more creative sides of their pieces?

In this piece, at least, Glass says that a listener's expectation should be high. He cites his own work at network news shows as a standard for journalistic excellence. However, as the interview happens, there's a sense hovering in the background that, perhaps, Mike Daisey was such a nice guy and such a compelling storyteller -- and his story was so vivid and fit so well with the rest of the piece -- that he was put on air with more trust than, clearly, he deserved.

As the story progresses, Glass moves from shocked and saddened, a kind of stomach-sinking feeling, to angry. He's clear about what his show has done wrong -- believing some of Daisey's story in the first place and not following up after they couldn't originally locate his translator -- but he's eventually even more clear about what Daisey's done wrong.

This is the stuff of Frey legend, actually. Daisey consistently hides behind the idea that his story is true, even if the facts within it are not. For example:

Ira Glass: So when it comes to underage workers and the man with the claw-hand it’s like - I don’t believe that that happened.
Mike Daisey: All I can tell you is that I stand by what I told you before – that I stand by those things.

Ira Glass: That those things happened – those specific things.19

Mike Daisey: Yes. And I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it.

Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.

Listening to the piece, Daisey sounds both miserable and like a man trying very, very hard not to admit to lying. In a way, he sounds like someone who realizes that what he's always done, what's always worked for him, is about to be something he can never do again.

Ira Glass: I have such a weird mix of feelings about this, because I simultaneously feel terrible, for you, and also, I feel lied to. And also I stuck my neck out for you. You know I feel like, I feel like, like I vouched for you. With our audience. Based on your word.
Mike Daisey: I’m sorry.

The only sympathy I can really muster for Daisey is that he seems to understand the power of story. It's too bad that his stories will likely never be as powerful, ever again. On the other hand, I think and genuinely hope This American Life will recover, and will learn, from this incident. I hope (and from my own experience, already know) that its loyal listeners will, too.

Post-Mitt-Mortem: It's beginning to look a lot like Reagan

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 02:03:14 -0400

Ah, the South: Kicking expectant presidential candidates in the balls since 19… whatever. OK, with the GOP, that's not always true. Though early-voting South Carolina and Georgia can be a little fickle, the rest of the states -- when they don't have a local boy in the race -- tend to fall in a winner-take-us-all pattern.

No, really. Let's play the Presidential Primary Game that everyone loves best: The last time a Republican lost Mississippi and won the nomination was in… wait for it… Never. Since Mississippi began holding presidential primaries (instead of caucuses), no candidate has lost Mississippi in the primary and won the nomination.

What about the last time someone lost Alabama and won the nomination? OK, OK, 2008. John McCain won Mississippi but lost Alabama -- to Mike Huckabee. So, more interesting question: When was the last time a non-southerner won Alabama but didn't win the nomination?

Well, for that, we'd need to travel back to a simpler time, a time when candidates came to office through the auspices of double resignation. It was a time when a young, former Democrat from Illinois (and California) with just a smile on his face, a dream in his heart, and a plucky second wife on his arm made a charge through the country calling for change -- for the second time.

And suddenly it's 1976 in here.

That year, the incumbent, President Gerald Ford, did win Mississippi's state delegation support (no primary yet), but he lost neighboring Alabama to a little upstart Californian governor named Ronald Reagan.

Reagan fought Ford all the way to the Kansas City convention, where his unfortunate choice of a Pennsylvania moderate as a running mate lost him just enough conservative support to guarantee Ford the victory.

We aren't there yet with Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Romney's still massively ahead in money and delegates. His political machine can grind Santorum's into the dust, and Santorum's conservative appeal seems to play well in the central-southern part of the country where, yes, the most conservatives live but also the least number of people (and delegates) actually live, as well.

Still, it's kind of fun to think of Romney as Ford and Santorum and Reagan, isn't it? One, inadvertently stumbling (pun intended) into a reputation as a bumbler; the other, a darling of the party's conservative wing but lacking (at first) the political machinery to actually mount a serious challenge -- until, with a sudden, unexpected string of victories, he could.

What's not at all alike in these scenarios, of course, is the Republican party. The primary issues in 1976 were foreign, not domestic, and certainly not broadly social. In the words of Professor John Aldrich, in his 1980 book Before the Convention: Strategies and Choices in Presidential Elections, "Reagan… had the problem of running a campaign against an opponent whose basic domestic positions were just not that different."

Does that sound much like today? Well… no. It's hard to believe that Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are part of the same party, much less that their domestic agendas might look anything alike as potential presidents.

Where 1976 does look more familiar is in the way that the convention fell apart. Here, though, I see Romney as Reagan -- too eager to compromise, too quick to court. Reagan in '76 reached for a moderate in an attempt to secure a few super delegates from the North, and in so doing, lost Southern and conservative support.

Romney, in '12, is reaching out to grasp the wrong hands all the time. Instead of owning his own record and his own positions throughout the campaign, he's been running to the locals -- a disastrous attempt when you so very, very clearly aren't from around these parts. If we get close to the convention without a declared victor, there's nothing in his current and past behavior to signal that he wouldn't try to cut an impossible, backfiring, ridiculously unprincipled deal to tie up the remaining votes.

In fact, I think that's the only way Santorum wins the nomination: Only Romney can beat Romney now.

The good news for the governor, I guess, is that even Reagan had to run three times before he could win. Romney 2016? Anybody?

Doonesbury strip pulled to avoid confusing Georgia readers

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:03:30 -0400

In case your newspaper isn't running Doonesbury this week, here it is. Just as interesting is the moderated discussion being posted under "Blowback" at the Doonesbury site, which ranges from touching stories about personal encounters to promises to pray for the artist's pro-murder soul.

Agreeing or disagreeing is never a good reason to censor the idea. Neither is pulling it from your paper because you're afraid that your readers might confuse the strip for commentary on their own state's news instead of knowing that it's about Texas.

So let's break this down. First, Jim Thompson, the Editorial Page editor for the Athens Banner-Herald, wrote Sunday in the "Editor's Corner" that he wouldn't be running the Doonesbury strip about the Texas ultrasound requirement because it would confuse his Georgia readers. Quote:

Given that the Georgia General Assembly is considering an abortion bill — House Bill 954, sponsored by Rep. Doug McKillip, R-Athens, which would prohibit abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy — I made a unilateral decision not to publish the “Doonesbury” strips intended for publication this week. Quite simply, I thought there was a real possibility that readers might confuse the topic of this week’s “Doonesbury” with Georgia’s proposed abortion legislation, and I didn’t want to add any confusion to the ongoing concerns, pro and con, about House Bill 954.

Since then, his reasons have been picked up and roundly mocked by major news sites. Thompson wrote today that he was reconsidering his stance: "That decision has, though, been viewed by many readers as an insult to their intelligence. I certainly understand that viewpoint, and that’s why I’m taking a new look at the issue." He says there might be a change -- a restoration of new Doonesbury instead of Doonesbury reruns -- on Wednesday.

^{Yes, that says Wisdom, Justice, Moderation.}

Is it possible to confuse the Doonesbury strip from today with what's happening in Georgia? Eh, maybe, if all you read is the comics. If not, the debate over HB954 has been pretty big news in the Peach state for the last few weeks -- particularly since the bill passed the House two weeks ago. If it were to take effect, this law would make all abortions illegal after 20 weeks unless the health of the mother or another unborn fetus were at risk. It specifically excludes psychological health, including suicidal impulses, from the reasons for termination. Doctors would also be required to report that they had proven gestational age to be at 20 weeks or below before performing any abortion services.

The bill has been hotly debated in this very Georgia newspaper, with one local doctor charging the bill could make caring obstetricians into criminals while another doctor chimed in to say neither male legislators nor uninvolved parties should be making the "agonizing" decisions best left between women and their physicians.

In fact, most of the debate about this bill centers around two points of argument: the bill's sponsor's contention of when a fetus can feel pain, and opponents' charges that the bill would force women to carry non-viable fetuses to term. Ultrasounds were't a spotlight star here.

So could you see the Doonesbury strip and, as a loyal and intelligent Georgian, become confused about what it means? Maybe! Maybe all abortion debates run together in your head. Truthfully, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. If running the Doonesbury strip got readers in Georgia to thinking and discussing further what limitations they're willing to accept -- and what governmental interference they're willing to endorse -- I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

Real learning often comes from confusion, after all, and wouldn't it be a blessing to see a little uncertainty interjected into a debate where, currently, certainty of righteousness is fueling a crusade for further restrictions nationwide.

The good news about the Kansas Caucuses

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 03:03:42 -0400

Here's something to feel a little more cheery about after hearing tonight's Kansas GOP caucus results: Of the approximately 1.7 million registered voters in Kansas, just under 30,000 showed up to tonight's caucuses. That means that only 1.7 percent of those registered to vote participated today, and only .89 percent of the voters (15,290 total) actually said "aye" to Rick Santorum.

Here's a list of things in Kansas that include about as many or more individuals than the caucuses for Rick Santorum:

The town of Great Bend (pop. 15,345)
The capacity of Allen Fieldhouse (~16,300)
Number of school children who visit the Sedgwick County Zoo every year (40,000)
Number of people who requested a Kansas Visitors Guide online in 2010 (23,396)
One day's attendance at the State Fair (roughly 35,000 a day)
Students at Hutchinson Community College (16,000)
Undergraduate students at Kansas State University (19,000)
Number of people who filed an initial claim for unemployment in Decemeber (sad but true: 23,985)
Number of Kansans who've lost jobs from Boeing in the last 10 years (also sad but true: ~15,000).
Number of people who work in airplane (or related) manufacturing in Wichita (44,000)
Number of people who work in information services statewide (27,800)
Current inmates and parolees of the Kansas Department of Corrections (15,214)
Circulation numbers for the Lawrence Journal-World (19,000)
Breeding pairs of ducks statewide (20,000)
And finally, this one's fun: Number of people who caucused for Barack Obama in 2008 (27,172)

Anyway, I think it's nice to remember that a very, very, very small part of the population met today to cast their votes. (Total number of votes cast in 2008's general presidential election: 1,235,858).

To the tiny sliver of Kansans who participated in the caucuses in my home state tonight: Clearly, you're the loudest voices in the room today, and I do applaud you for showing up to vote. I'm not surprised by the caucus results, but it doesn't mean I'm not sad to again see the state listed as a given for anyone who can throw together a sentence with "values" somewhere in it.

To everyone else: Kansas really isn't this crazy all the time.

Fake chicken (and Mark Bittman) to the rescue?

Fri, 9 Mar 2012 16:03:22 -0500

I'm very interested in the way that the New York Times has decided to elevate the value of food writers in the last year. Frank Bruni, the former restaurant reviewer, is also there, tackling topics as diverse as the 2012 election and Whitney Houston. Sam Sifton, the restaurant critic after Bruni, is now the National Editor -- with a little side dish of inter-office griping. And Mark Bittman, once the paper's go-to quick-fix recipe guy, is now an opinion-page specialist (with a recipe thrown into the magazine every three out of four Sundays).

It's Bittman's rise that I've watched most closely and been most interested by. When I first started reading his Minimalist columns, they were still a hit-or-miss stop for me because most of his recipes contained quick, meaty dinners or an abundance of "so easy to get in New York!" spices. Slowly, though, Bittman's cooking -- and his posts about it -- changed. Gone were the recipes for Crispy Duck with Roasted Turnips and Port Reduction; instead, Bittman began discussing and dissecting his own diet, eventually moving to a vegan-before-dinner "less-meatatarian" regimen that brought many more salads and veggie-rich soups into the mix. The man who once published Fish admitted he could never write an updated version because there would be no way to guarantee that the fish within would be sustainable. Instead, he published Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, and thus began his real opinion writing career.

What I find most interesting and ultimately exciting about Bittman's diet upgrade is that he (mostly) continutes to discuss it in the everyday way he always did in his Minimalist videos. In his books, and in his columns, you can see the activist he's become; some of his writings are off-putting, even to a sympathetic vegetarian reader like myself, because they often fail to understand the dietary and time demands of people who can't think about food full time.

But when he's talking food policy, what he's saying is usually sensible and interesting. Take, for instance, the video and accompanying article on the New York Times opinion page today, where he tours a small company that's making fake chicken.

It's not just a review of the fake meat's taste; it's an introduction to the idea that, perhaps, this could become an alternative to some of the rather thoughtless uses of chicken that already exist. When chicken is added to a pasta sauce or a wrap -- is it there for the chicken flavor? Or is it more a texture issue? Is it just that we've been raised to think there should be meat in a sandwich? If someone tossed this chicken into your soup, and you didn't know they'd made the switch, would you ultimately care? Would the everyday consumer ultimately care?

It's a fascinating question. My guess is that the answer will probably always come down to cost. If I can get a can of chicken-flavored soup for $1 and actual chicken soup for $1.50, and they taste the same, which do I buy? (Of course, getting a can of any soup is counter to Bittman's ultimate goal of thinking more about food production, but this is where my mind leapt).

The nice thing about having food issues debated more prominently at the Times, and about having food writers occupying non-traditional reviewer positions, is that it can open a path to conversation for an entirely new group of readers. I like what the Times is doing with Bittman. I hope they keep him in the foreground.