“Playwright Mike Daisey will not be the Cornish College of the Arts commencement speaker, the Seattle college announced Friday, reversing an earlier decision,” Melissa Davis reports for The Seattle Times.
“Daisey, a former Seattle resident, wrote the solo show ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,’ in which he describes meeting workers who were underage as well as workers who were poisoned by their jobs making Apple products in China,” Davis reports. “The piece came under scrutiny after Public Radio International’s ‘This American Life’ aired excerpts from it — and then found some of ‘Agony’ to be fabricated. The show aired a retraction last month, during which Daisey said that he didn’t meet any workers who were poisoned by their factory jobs, and that he guessed at the ages of some of the workers he met.”
Davis reports, “Before the retraction was broadcast, Cornish president Nancy Uscher said the college stood behind its decision to have Daisey speak at commencement and to receive an honorary degree. ‘We’re honoring Mike Daisey for the body of his work,’ Uscher said in March. But on Friday, Cornish said in a news release that “Mike Daisey will not participate in the 2012 Commencement ceremony at Cornish College of the Arts. Mr. Daisey has acknowledged that he personally did not witness all the events that he said he did, and he exaggerated the level of his own experiences to journalists.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Artistic license revoked.
When the porcine Mike Daisey gives up the ill-gotten gains that he made on the backs of lies about Apple and Steve Jobs and proves that his lies have not earned him a single penny, that is when any apology he oinks out will have meaning.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “krquet” for the heads up.]
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