The Passion of Mike Daisey: Journalism, Storytelling and the Ethics of Attention

I am telling you that I do not speak Mandarin, I do not speak Cantonese, I have only a passing familiarity with Chinese culture and to call what I have a passing familiarity is an insult to Chinese culture—I don’t know fuck-all about Chinese culture.

But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were fourteen years old, I met workers who were thirteen years old, I met workers who were twelve.

Do you really think Apple doesn’t know?

In a company obsessed with the details, with the aluminum being milled just so, with the glass being fitted perfectly into the case, do you really think it’s credible that they don’t know?

Or are they just doing what we’re all doing?

From part four, “The Gates of Foxconn” from “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” by Mike Daisey

Since 1997, Mike Daisey has written and performed monologues, exploring topics that include travel, genius, megalomania and the nature of truth and fiction. In September 2010, he began performing “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”, a monologue that explored the history of the Apple corporation, Steve Jobs’s peculiar wizardy, and the labor conditions in the Chinese factories where Apple devices are assembled. The monologue ends with a challenge to the audience: we are to understand the dark side of Apple’s greatness, the human toll of the goods we carry.

You will carry it to your homes, and when you sit down in front of your laptops, when you open them up, you will see the blood welling up between the keys. You will know that those were made by human hands. You will always know that. When you take your phones out outside to check the time, and the light falls across your face, you will know that it may have been made by children’s hands. You will know that.

From part nine, “A Virus of the Mind”, from “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs“

At some point in 2011, Ira Glass, creator and host of public radio program This American Life, saw Daisey’s stage performance and was fascinated by the story he heard. It’s hard to know precisely what Glass heard, as Daisey improvises from a script when performing the monologue, but he has published the script online, and the excerpts I’ve quoted above come from that document.

Glass invited Daisey to appear on This American Life, where he offered an abridged version of the monologue, focusing on his travels in China and his visits to the factories of Foxconn and other Apple suppliers. Daisey’s story was the first act of a two act show. The second act included an attempt to fact-check Daisey’s account, a discussion of Apple’s attempts at labor transparency, and a discussion of corporate ethics and outsourced labor. The show aired on January 6, 2012, and rapidly became one of This American Life’s most popular episodes.

On March 16, 2012, Marketplace – another prominent US public radio show – ran a story by journalist Rob Schmitz which challenged the authenticity of Daisey’s story. Schmitz had reported extensively on electronics factories in China, and details of Daisey’s story rang false to him. So he did some fairly simple fact-checking of his own: he called Daisey’s translator, who he found through a simple Google search, looking for translators named “Cathy” in Shenzen. Cathy Lee, Daisey’s translator, contradicted many of the details of Daisey’s account, making it clear that Daisey had embroidered some details and fabricated others.

That same day, This American Life retracted the story they’d aired ten weeks earlier, devoting an episode to correcting their errors and confronting Daisey. The episode, “Retraction“, has now become one of the most listened-to episodes of This American Life.

I was one of the 900,000 people who downloaded and listened to “Retraction” the week it was released. I drove home from MIT on the 16th, poured myself a stiff drink and listened to the piece, exchanging reactions over Twitter with other friends who were listening. The collective sentiment of my friends who spent their Friday night listening to a journalistic retraction on public radio: it was agonizing.

Glass is angry and hurt, and is seeking a confession from Daisey that isn’t forthcoming. He tells Daisey, “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. I feel like I vouched for you with our audience based on your word.” What we hear from Daisey is, most strikingly, silence. Ira’s questions are met with five, ten, fifteen seconds of dead air before Daisey responds, explaining his decisions. Rob Schmitz, confronting Daisey alongside Glass, describes the experience as “exhausting”. With exchanges like this one about meeting workers injured by neurotoxin n-hexane, it’s not hard to understand why:

Rob Schmitz: So you lied about that? That wasn’t what you saw?

Mike Daisey: I wouldn’t express it that way.

Rob Schmitz: How would you express it?

Mike Daisey: I would say that I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of my trip. And so when I was building the scene of that meeting, I wanted to have the voice of this thing that had been happening, that everyone had been talking about.

Ira Glass: So you didn’t actually meet an actual worker who had been poisoned by n-hexane?

Mike Daisey: That’s correct.

I listened to the Retraction show again yesterday morning, without the benefit of a glass of rye in my hand, and came away with another set of impressions. The first time through, I’d been struck by the sheer discomfort of the conversation. Listening yesterday, I found myself drawn to Daisey’s certainty that his work had been sound, and that his mistake was allowing it to be taken from the stage and put onto Glass’s show. I kept thinking about this short exchange:

Ira Glass: I’m saying, since then, did you worry that somebody would talk to Cathy (Daisey’s translator), and she would contradict you?

Mike Daisey: No, I worried about it all the time. I don’t know if this is a wise thing to be doing, telling you into this microphone, and this conversation. But yeah. I mean, I was kind of sick about it. Because I know that so much of the story is the best work I’ve ever made.

I don’t think Daisey is being disingenuous or evasive in declaring “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” to be some his best work. I’m going to argue that we need to consider that idea carefully, that Daisey’s story is both a success and a failure. His story is one of a handful of recent stories that have drawn attention to the tensions between journalism, storytelling and advocacy, and posed an intriguing set of questions for people interested in the future of news. What Mike Daisey’s story brings into focus is the tension between journalism as “a discipline of verification” and the power of – and need for – compelling narratives.

In early June 2011, the blog, “A Gay Girl in Damascus”, announced that the blog’s author, Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, the gay girl in question, had been kidnapped, presumably by Syrian authorities. While some internet activists mobilized to demand her release, others began questioning the authenticity of her identity. Through a long and detailed investigation, online and traditional journalists unmasked Amina Araf as Tom MacMaster, a married, middle-aged American man who’d adopted an online persona as a Syrian activist to draw attention to events in Syria. MacMaster argued that he’d had to create Amina so that people would pay attention to the crisis in Syria. Journalists responded that they’d taken the Amina character at face value because they understood the importance of attaching human faces to complex narratives, and because they were having such a difficult time getting on-the-ground accounts from Damascus.

On March 5, 2012, Invisible Children, an activist organization dedicated to raising awareness of international war criminal Joseph Kony, and the plight of children in northern Uganda, released a video titled Kony 2012. It rapidly became the most “viral” video of all time on YouTube, achieving 100 million views in six days. The video attracted criticism on at least three fronts. Some questioned Invisible Children’s financial motives, observing that the organization focuses primarily on awareness-raising and filmmaking, not on direct service on the ground in Northern Uganda. Others criticized the filmmaker’s decision to speak on behalf of Ugandans, rather than amplifying the voices of people affected directly by Kony and the violence in northern Uganda. Others, myself included, argued that the video oversimplified a complex situation and misrepresented the current situation in Uganda in order to attract more attention to their cause.

I don’t mean to suggest that these two incidents, plus Mike Daisey’s case, represent an emergent trend. I am certain that someone better versed in media history than I will find ample evidence of debates in the past about the borders between journalism and storytelling and between reporting and advocacy. But I’m intrigued by these conversations because the conversations about MacMaster, Kony and Daisey are some of the most passionate and inflamed I’ve participated in. If I judge from my comment threads, my post on Kony is the most controversial piece I’ve ever written, and my writeup of MacMaster follows close behind.

I had expected my Kony post to generate criticisms from supporters of Invisible Children, and I was not disappointed. I was somewhat more surprised by a set of critics – one who corresponded through a series of emails sent via anonymous remailer – who accused me of lying because my criticisms of Invisible Children focused on the content of their video and not their connections to evangelical churches and to right-wing donors.

The most interesting and challenging critiques came from friends who work in philanthropy, who argued that I was too quick to dismiss Invisible Children’s accomplishments. The organization quickly achieved something that’s often seen as impossible – getting American youth to pay attention to an international human rights issue. When I argued that Invisible Children was pointing to a crisis that was acute six years ago, but perhaps worth less attention currently than the Syrian government’s abuse of their citizens, a dear friend challenged me: if I really cared about Syria, I should learn from Invisible Children and launch my own campaign to generate attention. After all, isn’t Global Voices all about calling attention to forgotten parts of the world? Wasn’t my anger at Invisible Children really angry at my own failure to build the sort of audience for Global Voices that Invisible Children was able to command?

I spent a sleepless night thinking about my friend’s critique. I ended up concluding that the goals of a project like Global Voices are pretty different from those of Invisible Children. Global Voices is dedicated to amplifying the voices of people using social media in the developing world. It’s closer to a journalistic paradigm than to an advocacy one – indeed, the reason we have an advocacy arm is so we can separate that function, advocating for freedom of speech online and the release of imprisoned online writers, from our reporting functions. The conversation was a challenging one for me, because that line between advocacy and reporting is a very blurry one. When you call attention to events in a country like Madagascar, which receives very little media attention, you’re engaged in a form of advocacy, demanding more attention to a set of issues you believe are under-reported. And it’s possible to make the case that Kony2012 was a similar attempt to call attention to an under-reported situation.

I think the Daisey story is so fascinating and complex because his story occupies the blurry areas both between advocacy and journalism, and between journalism and storytelling.

One way to understand this second space of tension – between reporting news and constructing compelling narrative – is to look at a fascinating new book, “Lifespan of a Fact”. The book is essentially a long email exchange between essayist John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal, over a 15 page essay Agata wrote about a boy named Levi Presley, who jumped to his death from the observation deck of a Las Vegas hotel.

An excerpt, published in Harpers (which rejected D’Agata’s essay for factual inaccuracies, leading him to submit it to The Believer, where Fingal worked) gives a sense for the flavor of the conversation. Jim finds a fact he’s unable to verify – the number of strip clubs in the city – and D’Agata explains that he changed the number because it better fits the rhythm of the sentence.

It quickly becomes clear that they’re at cross purposes. Fingal notes that D’Agata’s account is likely to become the definitive account of Presley’s death, and wants to ensure the facts in that account are correct. D’Agata makes clear that he’s committed to the larger “truth” of Las Vegas, artifice and the stories we tell ourselves. Jennifer McDonald, evaluating the book on the front page of the New York Times book review makes clear she thinks D’Agata’s argument is crap:

This book review would be so much easier to write were we to play by John D’Agata’s rules. So let’s try it. (1) This is not a book review; it’s an essay. (2) I’m not a critic; I’m an artist. (3) Nothing I say can be used against me by the subjects of this essay, nor may anyone hold me to account re facts, truth or any contract I have supposedly entered into with you, the reader.

D’Agata’s view of the essay as telling a larger truth than the individual facts represent seems similar, to me, to the stance Daisey is taking with his piece. The abuses factory workers in China face are all real, he argues. That he didn’t personally meet them all is something he needs to gloss over to make his narrative work as a dramatic monologue. Were he to tell some stories as his encounters, others as accounts that he read, the monologue would lose much of the dramatic impact it has. It would work better as journalism, but less well as storytelling and as art.

A simpler narrative is a more effective one. That’s one of the core arguments made by Jason Mogus in an excellent evaluation of the Kony 2012 campaign, titled “Why your non-profit won’t make a KONY 2012“. Mogus argues, “This is of course the #1 criticism of IC’s work, that they over-simplified (or manipulated) the issue, lacking nuance on the complexity of the situation. But the fact that they made this video for their audiences, not for their policy specialists, is the secret of their success.” He is probably right. Advocacy to a broad audience almost certainly requires simplifying complex narratives.

And this is what Daisey argues he’s doing, in dialog with Glass in the Retraction episode:

And everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater was bent toward that end, to make people care. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work.

My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism. And it’s not journalism. It’s theater. It uses the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc.

And of that arc and that work I’m very proud. Because I think it made you care, Ira. And I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is it has made other people delve. And my hope is it has made other people delve.

Daisey references two important concepts in that statement: the caring problem, and the ladder of engagement. My friend (and boss) Joi Ito offered the first term to explain the challenges he’s had paying attention to news from parts of the world he knows little about. Knowing you should care about a civil war in Syria or ongoing conflict in Somalia isn’t the same thing as caring. Daisey recognizes that you may not care about labor conditions in Shenzen and that he may need to “make you care” through the power of storytelling, in the same way that Kony 2012 worked to make you care through talented filmmaking and the endorsement of celebrities who saw and were effected by the film.

Once you care, Daisey hopes you’ll go further, climbing “the ladder of engagement”, a term widely used by advocates and activists. A savvy political campaign manager will ask someone who’s come to a political rally to put up a yard sign, and someone who’s put up a yard sign to host a campaign event for a candidate. Some fraction of supporters will “climb the ladder”, becoming more involved and knowledgeable, until they become one of the leaders of the campaign, planning new creative actions for others to participate in.

In responding to criticism of the Kony 2012 video, The Resolve, an organization that describes itself as a partner of Invisible Children, invokes this theory to explain their support of the Kony 2012 video:

We created a “ladder” of engagement, offering activists a range of options to go deeper on the issue. For most of the people who watched Kony 2012, the video was the first time they had heard of the LRA. This means that there is a vast new pool of people who could be part of that critical mass needed to influence U.S. and international policy towards the conflict. To make them effective activists, Resolve offers them resources to get better informed about the conflict, ranging from our blog posts to in-depth policy reports based on our field research.

Even if an initial message is simplified, some percentage of the people who watch the video will become engaged and learn more about the situation, expanding from a black and white picture to a more complex and nuanced one. Given the challenges of getting people to care about a situation like child soldiers in Central Africa, or dangerous labor practices in China, perhaps the best we can do is offer a simplified explanation and hope others will delve deeper.

This idea came up at Center for Civic Media a few weeks back when Judy Richardson, one of the producers of the acclaimed Eyes on the Prize documentary series about the American Civil Rights movement visited Center for Civic Media. Eyes on the Prize took a number of radical steps as a documentary – rather than putting historians on camera to talk about events in the past, the people who participated in protests, marches and meetings talk about their experiences and narrate those events. This complicated the challenge of telling a compelling story, Richardson argued, but it was the right thing to do, as the message of Eyes on the Prize was that the movement was a vast, complicated thing, not just the work of Martin Luther King Jr.

She noted her disappointment that films like Mississippi Burning, which was loosely based on the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964, have reached far larger audiences than her documentary. She understands the need to simplify the story, she says, but Mississippi Burning goes too far, turning the FBI into the heroes of the story. “You don’t take dramatic license that far. It would be like making a film about World War II, and honoring the Vichy government collaborators, not the French Resistance.”

The Richardson line – when villans are transformed into heroes – is one line we might consider in evaluating when a simplified narrative becomes too simple. What triggered my reaction to Kony 2012 was the sense that it was treading very close to that line in talking about the LRA without talking about the Ugandan government’s role in herding Acholi people into camps for their ostensible safety and the human rights abuses committed by the Ugandan army. Joseph Kony is certainly a villan, but it’s far from clear that Museveni’s government – which has systematically squelched democratic dissent, or his army – whose incompetency and corruption have much to do with Kony’s continued freedom – should be the heroes we end up supporting.

Sam Gregory, Program Director at WITNESS, an organization that helps people affected by human rights abuses produce videos to advocate for their rights, suggests a more strenuous set of rules:

Simple is too simple when oversimplifying the problem leads to modeling the wrong solutions or to counter-productive impacts for the people who are directly affected.

Simple is too simple if the initial action participants are asked to take is not followed by a next step in a ladder of engagement (and I would note that Invisible Children explicitly notes the video is a ‘first entry point’ to engagement).

Simple is too simple when it models a solution that misdirects an audience’s understanding of the systemic causes of an issue (two analyses here of this in the context of Kony 2012 are presented by Ethan again, and Conor Cavanagh).

Simple is too simple when a simple entry point does not allow viewers/participants to easily drill down and engage with more complexity (see Lana Swartz’s working paper on this potential for ‘drillability’ in transmedia campaigns)

Simple is too simple when it perpetuates stereotypes (for example, a ‘rescue’ approach) or reinforces the lack of agency in situations where agency has already been assaulted by the human rights violations themselves. At the root of human rights work is human dignity.

Simple is too simple for a single human rights video when it misstates facts, uses footage or interviews out of context, or when it breaches ethical ideas on representation, particularly when that compromises people’s dignity and safety.

Are these the right places to draw the lines? Am I being fair in putting Kony 2012 on the wrong side of some – not all – of these lines? I don’t know. I can tell you why I think the video is one the wrong side of some lines, but I don’t get to draw the line for you. And I’m writing this essay in part because I don’t know how to draw the line (for myself, not for you) with Mike Daisey. I’m sympathetic to his assertion that there’s a different line for advocacy than for journalism… which forces me to acknowledge that the controversy over the Kony 2012 video stems, in part, from what rules we use to evaluate it. In other words, I think it’s possible to admire that Invisible Children used social media brilliantly and made an evocative and affecting film while being angry that the film was manipulative and upset about the lack of Ugandan voices. Invisible Children were doing their job in advocating for their cause, and it’s possible that I’ve been doing my job in critiquing their work and trying to amplify Ugandan voices who are responding.

I think it’s possible to understand Ira Glass’s anger in part through this lens of oversimplification. What This American Life has done so brilliantly over its 17-year run is tell complex stories using real people’s voices. Stories like “The Giant Pool of Money” take on intricate and complex narratives – the mortgage crisis – by interviewing individuals involved with different aspects of the housing industry. We hear their voices, not the voices of the reporters. It would be far easier to have a reporter or an expert navigate this complex territory, but part of the genius of the storytelling is that we come to realize that the mortgage crisis wasn’t the act of a small group of sinister, shadowy bankers crashing the global economy, but the rational decisions of hundreds of thousands of people doing what made sense to them at the time.

But This American Life has also championed other methods of storytelling. As their “About Our Radio Show” page attests:

We think of the show as journalism. One of the people who helped start the program, Paul Tough, says that what we’re doing is applying the tools of journalism to everyday lives, personal lives. Which is true. It’s also true that the journalism we do tends to use a lot of the techniques of fiction: scenes and characters and narrative threads.

Meanwhile, the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism: it’s fiction that describes what it’s like to be here, now, in America. What we like are stories that are both funny and sad. Personal and sort of epic at the same time.

If there’s a place on the radio for the sort of narrative Daisey puts forward, we might think it would be This American Life. But Daisey’s work isn’t cleanly journalism or fiction. It might be “civic fiction”, a term coined by my colleague Molly Sauter to try to explain narratives like that told by Tom MacMaster, a narrative that’s not factual, but designed to address important stories that are hard to tell any other way. Ben Walker, on his radio show Too Much Information, may be the best practitioner of the genre at present, blending hard news, interviews, and fictional storytelling without warning labels, leaving listeners wondering what, if any, of his remarkable narrative, Occupy Siberia – where Ben travels to rural Russia to offer a workshop on social media and ends up starting a revolution – is true.

As much as Glass admires Daisey’s storytelling, it’s clear from how he frames Daisey’s monologue on This American Life that he’s not ready to blur the journalism and fiction lines: “When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story on stage, when I left the theater I had a lot of questions. I mean, 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.”

That factchecking in the original episode obviously left something to be desired. But once Glass moves from checking individual details (TAL reveals that Foxconn’s cafeteria may seat 4,000, not the 10,000 Daisey asserted!) to considering larger issues, it opens up a fascinating dialog. Glass interviews Ian Spaulding of INFACT Global Partners, an organization that’s worked with many hundreds of Chinese factories to bring their labor practices up to international standards. He questions Daisey’s assertions about child labor, arguing that it happens, but very rarely at international electronics manufacturers. But he acknowledges that Chinese workplace conditions are brutal, by western standards. At the same time, he argues that these situations are changing rapidly from bottom-up pressure – the labor market in China is very tight, and factories like Foxconn experience 10% monthly turnover, leading them to improve working and living conditions.

The “fact-check” turns into a discussion about whether it’s fair for the US to outsource labor to other countries without sending western labor standards abroad as well. This leads to the odd experience of Nicholas Kristof discussing an essay he wrote with his wife, Sherryl WuDunn – who’s from a part of China near Foxconn’s factory – that offers “Two Cheers for Sweatshops“. Kristof and WuDunn argue that the sweatshop era is a relatively brief one in a country’s economic development, and that the working conditions are significantly better than the alternative – rural poverty.

For me, this postscript was the most helpful part of the show. Mike’s story puts productively uncomfortable questions on the table: How much should we care about the people who make the devices we use? When we export jobs, do we have a responsibility to export our labor protections as well? What’s the balance between development and considerations of worker safety? Daisey’s story from Shenzen falls well short of journalistic standards for reporting. But in terms of provoking an interesting conversation on rich topics, it’s massively successful. Unfortunately, those rich conversations get eclipsed once the conversation turns into a question of whether Daisey falsified a story.

Again, it’s fair to ask whether the Kony 2012 video and the ensuing critique had a similar effect. I’m tempted to dismiss this possibility by arguing that Kony 2012 leaves fewer open questions that Daisey’s piece. But the fact remains that the video, the backlash and the ensuing conversation brough some unfamliar voices to the fore, like journalist and blogger Rosebell Kagumire, whose YouTube response to the Kony2012 video has received more than half a million views. It’s certainly possible that there’s been more mainstream media attention to Central Africa this past month than in an average year.

But this can’t be our preferred working method. For one thing, it’s brutal for the people who tell these provocative stories. Jason Russell’s tragic public breakdown has been attributed to stress from criticism of the Kony video. Chicago Theatre has cancelled a Daisey performance and other places he’s scheduled to deliver his piece are fielding questions about whether tickets will be refunded. Chicago Public Radio has announced that they’ll be investigating the fact-checking behind the original Daisey story. There has to be a better way to start complex, multilayered discussion than offering a simplified, compelling narrative, then battering it to pieces… right?

Why is this conversation about journalism and advocacy, simplification and complexity happening now?

We’ve seen a rise in the ability to create media and advocate for your cause and your viewpoint over the past decade. And there’s been a massive rise in content available to all of us – and an accompanying rise in ability to choose what we pay attention to – over the past two decades. The result is an increasingly fierce battle for attention. We may be able to find and publish information much more easily, but we’ve still got a limited number of hours in the day to pay attention to different topics, and advertisers, advocates, journalists and every cranky academic with a blog (and yes, I’m pointing to myself here) is demanding that scarce attention.

These questions about attention are what led me onto the odd academic/critic/activist path I find myself on today. It began with an activist question: “How do we get people to invest in technology businesses in sub-Saharan Africa?” That led to an academic question: “Why is so much news from Africa about conflict and so little about positive developments?” That led back to activism with Global Voices and back to academe with questions about how Global Voices could be more effective in amplifying voices and changing media narratives.

I’m wondering if stories like Mike Daisey’s mark a shift in this conversation about attention. The conversation has involved web publishers, advertisers and activists all asking how we compete successfully for small slices of attention. With stories like Daisey’s and Kony 2012, the conversation switches from the practical question of seizing attention to the ethical questions of attention. What’s fair play in demanding attention for a story or for a cause? How far can you simplify a story to gain attention? How much can you speak on someone else’s behalf? Perhaps the reason these conversations get so passionate is that they’re not just about the rules of different professions but about the basic question, “What can someone demand I pay attention to?”