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Friday Afternoon Open

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W of O. The Time Zone Warrior.3/16/2012 9:24:34 pm PDT

Oh dear….


I don’t want to say that Apple is holy and that their workers in China are earning a decent wage but it seems that the company was shafted by a sloppy documentary. A few weeks ago a documentary made headlines as it highlighted the working conditions of it’s Chinese employees. Conditions were hazardous, working hours were long, living quarters were inadequate.

But now it turns out a lot of the information given in the documentary was faked!

Apple in the meantime got grilled over this controversy. As said, I don’t think everything is alright now but this time I think Apple got a bad rep for the wrong reasons.

During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey’s story, This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter’s contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn’t work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.

“At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” says Ira Glass, Executive Producer and Host of This American Life. “But other things Daisey told us about Apple’s operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.”

Comment from the documentary maker Mike Dailey:

“I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” Daisey tells Schmitz and Glass. “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.”

This stinks….