Glass Houses
On the hypocrisy of This American Life.I also found it extremely difficult to listen to the “Retraction” episode of This American Life. I could not even listen to the whole episode—I had to read the transcript. The only way I could have relieved the fury building up inside me, as I listened to that podcast, would have been to slap Ira Glass across the face. I have never heard such sanctimonious, self-serving hypocrisy in my life—not from someone I respect.
I am going to tell you some things that may shock you. Richard III was not a hunchback. Salieri played no part in Mozart’s death. On a related note, Facebook is not Mark Zuckerberg’s revenge against a world of human relationships that he realized he could never really be a part of. When I was in college, I was in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged); and every night I, Caitlin Cashin, declared that one of my fellow performers was a preeminent Shakespearean scholar with a bachelors degree knowing full well that neither of these things were true.
You see, in the theatre, and in many other creative forms that attempt to tell stories, we find that when one has approximately two to three hours to recount a complex story with a number of intriguing personalities and important points and events to convey to an audience that has payed upwards of $50 per seat, one must streamline the product.
Every production has something to say, some particular perspective—an agenda, if you will; and, ideally, every aspect of a production is working toward illustrating and driving home that agenda in the most concise and effective way possible. Most productions fail to achieve this—it is a rare and serendipitous thing. The very suggestion that a piece of theatre has somehow “conned” its audience is absurd. You mean Willy Loman didn’t kill himself so Biff could collect the insurance? Shakespeare didn’t set Julius Caesar in fascist Italy? I demand an apology!
Two people are at fault here. It was stupid of Mike Daisey to lie on air, I completely agree with that. He should have said from the beginning, “Look, Ira, this is a piece of theatre. Everything I’ve described has happened to somebody—somebody told me these stories, but they’re not all my personal experiences. But I don’t think that should diminish their impact.” It seems like Mike Daisey hasn’t really thought too much about his position as an artist and the particular nature of the monologue or at least he’s not very good at talking about it, but a lot of artists are bad at talking about their work.
I feel sorry for Daisey. I think he created a piece of art that really spoke to people and made them think and that he was terrified that this journalistic integrity he was suddenly being held to would destroy the positive impact of his piece. I agree that he was stupid to lie to Ira Glass, but I don’t think he deserved to be humiliated and to have his work invalidated on NPR for it.
Ira Glass should have had the presence of mind to decide that since The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is theatre, they don’t have all the facts, and since This American Life frequently features fiction, poetry, and other creative works (which, I assume, are meant to influence and inspire people in spite of their fictitious nature or complex relationship with factual truth), he should present The Agony and the Ecstasy as one of the many creative works presented on This American Life. At the very least, he could have used his retraction not as an opportunity to publicly disgrace a man who actually got people to pay attention to where their Apple products come from, but as an opportunity to discuss journalism, truth, the creative work, their social impacts, what we expect from these things and how we define them, and why we have those expectations. But I guess that’s really Radiolab territory.
Mike Daisey wrote in his blog:
Many consider this week’s THIS AMERICAN LIFE episode one of the most painful they’ve ever listened to. In particular the segment with me is excruciating—four hours of grilling edited down to fifteen minutes. I thought the dead air was a nice touch, and finishing the episode with audio pulled out of context from my performance was masterful.
That’s Ira’s choice, and it’s his show. He’s a storyteller within the context of radio journalism, and I am a storyteller in the theater.
What does tearing down Mike Daisey (or KONY 2012) on the basis of journalistic integrity achieve? It’s not as if thousands of Americans, inspired by Mike Daisey, were prepared to storm in and put an end to Foxconn—an action that would have destroyed tens of thousands of jobs for Chinese workers—until they tuned into NPR.
Maybe Mike Daisey lied, but he got people to care about real problems. I know it’s a very complex problem that will require a complex solution, but how are we supposed to find that complex solution to our participation in this problem if no one gives a shit? The goal of a creative work like The Agony and the Ecstasy is to inspire, provoke, and compel people to think. The onus is on you, the audience, to pursue that thought when you leave the theatre. I’m sorry to hear Ira Glass doesn’t know that.
The problem is not that this performer has lied to us in his monologue and about his monologue. The problem is that institutions like the news, television, education and the government—institutions that are meant to be based in factual truth and merit, and are supposed to have the public’s best interests, are not and do not. They are increasingly based on personal agendas and increasingly theatrical in attempting to achieve their goals.
Don’t be angry that you get theatre when you go to the theatre, be angry that you get theatre everywhere else.
Anyone who saw this beached whale on the Bill Maher show knew he was full of S. What a tool.
By the way, no one was talking about this clown until after Steve Jobs passed. What a douche, naming his show after SJ. Total exploitation.
Why do you think Daisey’s monologue was treated differently than The Social Network or Shakespeare’s plays?
Well, in Shakespeare’s case, no one cares because 1. they’re hundreds of years old – the fact that Richard III’s infamy was part of a smear campaign against the House of York by the House of Lancaster after the War of the Roses is largely irrelevant to modern life, for example; 2. the stories (and characters) are too good to lose. One could say that art has transcended history in this case. As for The Social Network, I think that cinema is such an integral part of modern culture that, for the most part, everyone knows how movies are made, everyone’s a bit of an expert, and everyone has developed a reasonable amount of cynicism towards the stories being told in films. And, of course, with Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher on board, I think people were more willing to defend liberties taken with the story on an artistic basis. Then there is the obvious difference: in Shakespeare, etc. they are recreating and performing the events of the story, whereas Agony and the Ecstasy is a monologue – it’s one man sitting there telling stories in the first person. Mike Daisey could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he hadn’t cast himself as Mike Daisey. He could have also gone with a more conventional narrative story, but that would have seemed white savior bullshit from the very start, and he had something to say.
I think there’s a certain naivety about theatre (because people don’t go to the theatre as much), and they have a tendency to assume that they can take it at face value and that whatever they’re seeing is somehow “good for them” and/or that any piece of theatre they see is good theatre, or representative theatre, and that’s just not true.
Daisey’s “storytelling” is not comparable to a stage play. The difference lies (pun intended) in the presentation.
By anyone’s standards, Daisey lied. He lied again and again. By presenting untruths, half-truths and embellished second-hand anecdotes as factual, fact-checked and personally witnessed – what part of this does not constitute wilful deception?
Daisey told Glass it boils down to a question of perspective – a difference between Daisey’s and Glass’ perspective on “what is real.”
Glass’ retort: “I think I have a normal person’s perspective.”
Right on. Comparing what Shakespeare did with Richard III with what Daisey has done just doesn’t hold water. The fact that the Richard III character, hunchbacked and murderous, overtook its historical basis in later years is largely thanks to the lack of comprehensive, impartial historical scholarship, which even in Britain is a relatively recent invention. The same applies to literary license taken with Boudicca, Julius Caesar, Marie Antoinette and other historical characters. Errors are debunked by modern scholars, idiots will even take some dramatizations as fact – look at everything Mel Gibson has directed. But responsibility for this blurring of fact and fiction does not lie with Shakespeare, any more than it does with Fincher, Gibson or anyone else dramatizing real life. Why? Because they cast ACTORS in the lead roles, hire SCREENWRITERS to come up with the words, and MARKET THEIR WORKS AS “BASED ON A TRUE STORY.” Despite all these flashing warning signs, I admit that some of us might still be hoodwinked (the Passion, Braveheart, Schindler’s List), but that’s the fault of nobody but ourselves.
I would, conversely, wonder that anyone who attended Daisey’s stage show could not be misled to think this was all stuff that happened for real, to him.
Nobody mistook the actor playing Richard III for the real historical figure, for reasons too obvious to point out. Nobody thinks Jesse Eisenberg is actually Mark Zuckerberg. Because we can distinguish between a play or film and real life. The line gets blurred when someone like Daisey appears, as himself, to talk about events which he baldly states happened to him in real life. Without a disclaimer, how is that not deceptive? Did he appear on stage in his Hawaiian shirt and shorts combo? No. Did he explain at the beginning that he was not giving a true account of his experiences in China, but a dramatization based on his experiences and the experiences of others? No. Did he masquerade as an amateur journalist to get his message across?
Well, kind of, yeah. He may have said at the beginning of his monologue that “I’m not a journalist.” But he followed that statement by saying that “this happened to me.” As we now know, this statement was false on numerous counts.
Hell, as an egotist and an actor, I sympathize with Daisey. We all love to embellish a good yarn to make it a rippingly good yarn. But not all of us accept money from paying audiences to embellish our personal anecdotes. We want people to care, and we know when a story isn’t juicy enough to sell by itself. Daisey’s wasn’t. He should have stopped right there. But he didn’t – and became a fraud.
Moreover – why are you attacking Ira Glass so viciously? You said yourself you respect the man. He was, I felt, remarkably patient with Daisey, who, it was interesting to note, never admitted to lying, trying to find euphemisms instead for his completely intentional distortion of facts in order to sell his stage show. TAL went to great lengths to admit to their own wrongdoings in their retraction. They fucked up by not double-checking with Daisey’s translator. I’m not excusing that fuckup, it’s indefensible. However, they regularly feature fiction in their broadcasts, and are always at pains to label it as such. Daisey labeled his work as fact – and they took him at his word. Error, but this time, a forgivable one.
Plus, you allege that “everything he said happened to someone.” It blatantly didn’t. He alleged there were guards with guns at the Foxconn plant. Not true of that plant, or any in China, as far as anyone knows. He made up a story about an overpass that ended in mid-air. Nice image, but not one he ever saw. He concocted a story about an old man whose fingers had been crushed in a hydraulic press, who ran his twisted digits over Daisey’s iPad, remarking, “it’s like magic.” He made the entire episode up. Didn’t happen. Not to Daisey, not to anyone else. The guy didn’t exist, the words weren’t spoken, none of it.
I agree that theatre is different from journalism. But Daisey didn’t market his show as a dramatized account of working conditions in Chinese factories. He didn’t offer a disclaimer, and he cast himself, as himself, in the main role. You claim he got people to care about issues. Damn right he did. Until the “guns” remark, I believed every word. Afterward, I wasn’t so sure. But the extent of his deception shocked even me. And now the same people who “cared,” having discovered his deception, will choose not to trust Daisey’s word on anything. Ever. They may even start to deny that Chinese working conditions are a problem. So his deception has undermined his supposed “cause.”
You imply that it would be better if this deception hadn’t been exposed. Would it be better if mortgage fraud was kept on the downlow, simply because exposing it might shake public confidence in banks? Wouldn’t you rather know if you were being deceived?