Apple and the Daisey affair: Why did the company keep its silence, when it knew a year ago what we know now?
“Mike Daisey began performing his off-Broadway monologue ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’ in January 2011,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “The show, which cast a harsh light on the working conditions in the Chinese factories that produce nearly half of the world’s electronic devices, was presented as fact — a description of what Daisey saw first hand during a visit to China in May and June of 2010.”
“We now know, thanks to follow-up reporting by Rob Schmitz at American Public Media’s Marketplace, that Daisey’s monologue — as he reluctantly admits — was a piece of theater, not a factual report,” P.E.D. reports. “It was concoction of things he saw, things he read about, things he just made up. Daisey lied to Ira Glass.. on This American Life. He lied to me last January when he stood by his reporting and told me — to my face — that he met workers at Foxconn’s assembly plant as young, even, as 11 years old.”
P.E.D. reports in an update, “It turns out the Apple public relations staffers did talk to reporters — always off the record — about Mike Daisey, pointing out inaccuracies in his account and suggesting that it was extremely unlikely that one man could have seen as much as Daisey claimed he saw in one trip to China. Among the journalists they warned off the Daisey story were Ira Glass and This American Life producer Brian Reid.”
