This American Life #460 “Retraction” 3/16/12

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE 100% ACCURATE AND MAY CONTAIN MISSPELLINGS, FORMAT MISTAKES AND OTHER INACCURACIES.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass

And I'm coming to you today to say something that I've never had to say on our program.

Two months ago, we broadcast a story that we've come to believe is not true. It's a story that got a lot of attention. More people downloaded it than any episode we've ever done.

This is Mike Daisey's story about visiting a plant in China where Apple manufactures iPhones and iPads and other products. He's been performing this story onstage as a monologue since 2010. We didn't commission this story, we didn't send him to China. We excerpted the stage show that he's been telling in theaters around the country.

We did factcheck the story before we put it on the radio. But in factchecking, our main concern was whether the things Mike says about Apple and about its supplier Foxconn. which makes this stuff, were true. That stuff is true. It’s been corroborated by independent investigations by other journalists, studies by advocacy groups, and much of it has been corroborated by Apple itself in its own audit reports.

But what's not true is what Mike said about his own trip to China.

As best as we can tell, Mike's monologue in reality is a mix of things that actually happened when he visited China and things that he just heard about or researched, which he then pretends that he witnessed first hand. He pretends that he just stumbled upon an array of workers who typify all kinds of harsh things somebody might face in a factory that makes iPhones and iPads.

And the most powerful and memorable moments in the story all seem to be fabricated.

At the time that we were factchecking his story we asked Mike for the contact information for the interpreter that he used when he was visiting China, who he calls Cathy in his monologue. We wanted to talk to her to confirm that the incidents that he described all happened as he describes them.

And When we asked for her information he told us her real name wasn't Cathy, it was Anna and he had a cellphone number for her but he said when he tried it, it didn't work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.

And because the other things Mike told us – about Apple and Foxconn – seemed to check out, we saw no reason to doubt him, and we dropped this. We didn’t try further to reach the translator.

That was a mistake.

I can say now in retrospect that when Mike Daisey wouldn't give us contact information for his interpreter we should've killed the story rather than run it. we never should've broadcast this story without talking to that woman.

Instead, we trusted his word. Although he's not a journalist, we made clear to him that anything he was going to say on our show would have to live up to journalistic standards. He had to be truthful. And he lied to us.

All this came to our attention because the China correspondent for the public radio program Marketplace, Rob Schmitz, who lives in Shanghai, heard the story and had questions about it, he had suspicions about it.

And he went out and he found the translator.

And although Mike told us her name is Anna - he now admits, to keep us from finding her - her name actually is Cathy, just like he says in his monologue.

Rob ran the details of Mike's monologue by Cathy and learned that much of the story is not factual. Cathy gave Rob emails between her and Mike that corroborated her version of some of the events.

Today on our show we're going to hear what she said to Rob, and then we're going to talk to Mike Daisey about why he lied to all of you and to me, off the air, during the factchecking process.

And we're going to end our show with someone who actually knows the facts of what happens in Apple's suppliers in China, who’s going to review those with us.

I should say, I am not happy to have to come to you and tell you that something that we presented on the radio as factual is not factual. All of us in public radio stand together and I have friends and colleagues on lots of other shows who – like us here at This American Life – work hard to do accurate, independent reporting week in, week out. I and my coworkers on This American Life are not happy to have done anything to hurt the reputation of the journalism that happens on this radio station every day. So we want to

be completely transparent about what we got wrong, and what we now believe is the truth.

And let's just get to it.
Here's Rob Schmitz, who usually reports for Marketplace, in Shanghai. [Act one. Cathy's Account.]

Rob Schmitz: One of the big things that didn’t sit right with me came early on in Daisey’s monologue, when he talks about arriving at the gates of the Foxconn factory. 

[CLIP] Mike Daisey: And I get out of the taxi with my translator. And the first thing I see at the gates are the guards. And the guards look pissed. They look really pissed, and they are carrying guns.

I’ve done reporting at a lot of Chinese factories, and I’ve never seen guards with guns. The only people allowed to have guns in China are the military and the police...not factory guards.

Later, Daisey meets with factory workers who he says belong to an illegal union, one that’s not authorized by the Chinese government.  

[CLIP] Mike Daisey: And I say to them, how do you know who's right to work with you? How do you find people to help you organize? And they look at each other bashfully, and they say well, we talk a lot. We have lots of meetings, and we meet at coffeehouses and different Starbucks in Guangzhou. And we exchange papers... 

Wait, hold on. Rewind.

 
[CLIP] Mike Daisey: 
...we meet at coffeehouses and different Starbucks in Guangzhou.

Factory workers who make fifteen, twenty dollars a day are sipping coffee at Starbucks? Starbucks is pricier in China than in the US. A reporter friend of mine didn’t believe this, either. He said Chinese factory workers gathering at Starbucks is sort of like United Auto Workers in Detroit holding their meetings at a Chinese teahouse. 

I talked to other reporters over here - we all noticed these errors - and it made us wonder ... what else in Daisey’s monologue wasn’t true? 
 

I decided to track down his translator, Cathy, who’s a big character in the story.    
I could pretend finding her took amazing detective work.  
 

But basically, I just typed “Cathy and translator and Shenzhen” into Google.    
I called the first number that came up. 

Rob Schmitz: I’m looking for somebody in Shenzhen named Cathy, and that’s why I’m calling you; who worked for a gentleman named Mike Daisey, and I’m wondering if you ever worked with a man named Mike Daisey?
 

Cathy Lee: Yes! He’s from America, right? 

Rob Schmitz: Did you work with him?

Cathy Lee: Sure.

Rob Schmitz: So that was you, actually?

 
Cathy Lee: Yes.   

Her name is Li Guifen, but with westerners, professionally, she goes by the anglicized name Cathy Lee.  
 
I tell her that Daisey put her in a stage show about Apple and Foxconn. I ask her if she knows about this. Nope. She knew Daisey was writing something, but that’s it. She hasn’t heard from him since 2010, when he hired her in Shenzhen. 

So I fly there to see her and the next day, she takes me to the exact spot she took Daisey – the gates of Foxconn. 
 

[ambient noise]

Rob Schmitz: You guys came here – what, in 2010?

 
Cathy Lee: Yeah, 2010. 

Rob Schmitz: The night before, I sent Cathy a link to the This American Life episode with Daisey. And I brought a copy of his script with me to the gates.

Cathy Lee: You know, I listened to the radio of Michael Daisey. I think it’s ok he write things. But some of them he write is true, some of them he write is not true.

But he’s not telling the whole truth. 

She says a lot of details were exaggerated...some of them were just plain made-up. We start with their itinerary: Daisey makes it sound like he talked to lots of workers - in interviews he’s said hundreds - but Cathy says it was maybe 50 people on the outside - they were just at Foxconn’s gates for two mornings.

And emails between Daisey and Cathy, which she gave me, show that the chronology of the story that Daisey tells on stage is a fabrication. In his monologue he says he visited Foxconn’s gates and then decided to pose as a businessman to get tours of factories. In fact, he visited Foxconn the morning after he arrived in Shenzen a factory called KTC technology that very afternoon. It was all set up in advance. 

Daisey told Ira that he and Cathy visited ten factories, posing as business people. Cathy says it was only three. 
 
And then, there’s the guns. 

Cathy Lee: You know guns are not allowed to be carried by security guards. It’s

illegal.

 
 
Cathy says she’s never seen a gun in person, only in the movies and on tv, so she’d remember it.  
 
And there are more important parts of Daisey’s story that she says didn’t happen. 
 
The biggest is the children. Daisey describes meeting a worker from the iPhone assembly line.  

[CLIP] Mike Daisey: And I say to her, you seem kind of young. How old are you? And she says, I'm 13. And I say, 13? That's young. Is it hard to get work at Foxconn when you're-- and she says oh no. And her friends all agree, they don't really check ages. I'm telling you ... in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were 14 years old, 13 years old, 12. Do you really think Apple doesn't know? 

Rob Schmitz: did the guards have guns when you came here with Mike Daisey?

 
Cathy Lee: No. Definitely no. 

Rob Schmitz: So he wasn’t telling the truth about that.

In fact, underage workers are sometimes caught working at Apple suppliers. Apple’s own audit says in 2010 when Daisey was in China, Apple found ten facilities where 91 underage workers were hired ... but it’s widely acknowledged that Apple has been aggressive about underage workers, and they’re rare. That’s 91 workers out of hundred of thousands. Ira asked Mike about this on the This American Life broadcast, and he admitted it might be rare, but he stuck by his story: 

[CLIP] Mike Daisey: I know that I met people who were there. And I know that I talked to them. I mean there weren’t very many as a proportion of the total group. I talked to more than 100 people I met 5 or 6 that were underage.

Ira Glass: All in one group?

Mike Daisey: Yes they were. They seemed like savvy kids honestly.

 
 
Rob Schmitz: Do you remember meeting 12 year-old, 13 year-old, and 14 year- old workers here?
 
Cathy Lee: No, I don’t think so. Maybe we met a girl who looked like she was 13 years old, like that one, she looks really young.
 
Rob Schmitz: Is that something that you would remember?
 
Cathy Lee: I think that if she said she was 13 or 12, then I would be surprised. I would be very surprised. And I would remember for sure. But there is no such thing. 
 

She’d be surprised, because she says in the ten years she’s visited factories in Shenzhen, she’s hardly ever seen underage workers. 
 
Then there’s the meeting Daisey says he had with workers from an unauthorized union, a secret union. Cathy confirmed that this did happen.  

Daisey told Ira that they met with twenty-five to thirty workers, in an all-day meeting. Cathy remembers two workers, she says maybe there were two or three others, and it was couple hours over lunch, at a restaurant.  
 
Daisey describes a birdlike woman who showed them a government-issued blacklist of people companies weren’t allowed to hire. She remembers the blacklist, but she also remembers that it didn’t have an official government stamp. Anything government- issued in China carries an official stamp. So she wonders if the blacklist was real. 
 
Here’s another part of that meeting with the illegal union, from Daisey’s monologue: 

[PLAY SIMULTANEOUSLY AND THEN CROSSFADE INTO]

Rob Schmitz: ..shake uncontrollably. Some of them can’t even pick up a glass. Did you meet people who fit this description? 

Cathy Lee: No.

Rob Schmitz: So there was nobody who said they were poisoned by hexane?

Cathy Lee: No. Nobody mentioned the Hexane.

Rob Schmitz: Ok. And nobody had hands that were shaking uncontrollably?

Cathy Lee: No.

 
 
So where did this come from? 
 
Two years ago, workers at an Apple supplier were poisoned by n-Hexane. It was all over the news in China. But this didn’t happen in Shenzhen. It happened nearly a thousand miles away, in a city called Suzhou. I’ve interviewed these workers, so I knew the story.

And when I heard Daisey’s monologue on the radio, I wondered: How’d they get all the way down to Shenzhen? It seemed crazy, that somehow Daisey could’ve met a few of them during his trip.  
 

Cathy suggests that Daisey saw reports about this in the news, and copied and pasted it into his monologue. 
 
Which bring us to the most dramatic point in Daisey’s monologue – apparently onstage it’s one of the most emotional moments in the show. It comes at this union meeting. 

Daisey describes an old man with leathery skin who used to work at foxconn ... making metal enclosures for ipads and laptops. ... he says the man got his hand caught in a metal press, and that it was now a twisted claw. He says he got no medical attention, and then Foxconn fired him for working too slowly. 

[CLIP] Mike Daisey: There's a group that's talking about hexane. N-hexane is an iPhone screen cleaner. It's great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them...can't even pick up a glass.

[CLIP] Mike Daisey: And when he says this, I reach into my satchel, and I take out my iPad. And when he sees it, his eyes widen, because one of the ultimate ironies of globalism, at this point there are no iPads in China. .... He's never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen, and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view, and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand, and the icons slide back and forth. And he says something to Cathy, and Cathy says, "he says it's a kind of magic." 

Cathy Lee: No. This is not true. You know, it’s just like a movie scenery.

Rob Schmitz: it sounds like a movie.

 
Cathy Lee: yeah. Very emotional. But not true to me. 

Cathy does remember this guy. But she says the man never told them he had ever worked at Foxconn. 
 
There are other details of Daisey’s monologue Cathy says never happened when she was with him: The taxi ride on the exit ramp Daisey says petered out into thin air 85 feet up off the ground. The workers with repetitive motion injuries. The factory dorm rooms Daisey claims they saw. Cathy says they never saw any dorm rooms. The emotional conversation between them, where Daisey touches her hand. Didn’t happen that way, she says. Even the conversation where Cathy warns Daisey that interviewing workers at the gates of Foxconn wouldn’t work....of course it would work, she told me. She’s taken other foreigners to Foxconn and other factory gates for years — it’s part of her job. It always works. 

Now of course Cathy’s memory isn’t perfect. This was nearly two years ago - June 2010 - and neither she nor Mike took notes. On some of these things, her memory’s hazy. She didn’t seem mad at Mike at all. 
 

Cathy Lee: He is a writer. So I know what he say is only maybe half of them or less actual. But he is allowed do do that right? Because he’s not a journalist.
 
Rob Schmitz: I don’t know. You’re right. He’s a writer. He’s a writer and an actor.

 
Cathy Lee: Yeah. 
Rob Schmitz: However, his play is helping form the opinions of many Americans.  
Cathy Lee: Um....As a Chinese, I think it’s better if he can tell the American

people the truth. I hope people know the real China. But he’s a writer and he exaggerate some things. So, I think it’s not so good. 

Rob Schmitz: I wanted to talk to you about what you saw in China....

 
 
It’s a week later. I’m in my tiny Shanghai studio talking to Mike Daisey, who’s sitting in This American Life’s studio. Ira’s there too - with questions of his own. 

 
Rob Schmitz: How many factories did you visit when you were there?   
Mike Daisey: I believe I went to 5. 
 
Rob Schmitz: You told ira 10. 
 
Mike Daisey: I know.

Rob Schmitz: OK.
Mike Daisey: But, now that I’m looking at it, I believe it was 5.

 
 
Cathy remembers three. 
 
Daisey also revises the number of illegal union members he met. He originally told Ira 25 to 30. Now he knocks it down to ten. Cathy remember, said it was between 2 and 5. 
 
I ask Mike about the underage workers. I explain to him that Cathy said there weren’t any. I tell him that foreigners often think Chinese people look younger than they actually are. 

Mike Daisey: Well they did look young, but the girl I spoke with told me she was 13. So I took her at her word, and that’s what happened. 

Rob Schmitz: Why would Cathy say that you did not meet any underage workers?

Mike Daisey: I don’t know. I do know when doing interviews a lot of people were speaking in English. They enjoyed using English with me and I don’t know if she was paying attention at that particular point. I don’t know. There was a lot of wrangling that Cathy was doing, talking to people and sort of pre-interviewing.

Rob Schmitz: So Mike, according to what you’re saying, these are migrant workers who are preteen, 13 or 14 years old, there English isn’t going to be very

good. You’re telling me that they were speaking English to you, in a way that you could understand?
 
Mike Daisey: Well, I only know – only one of them was really talkative and that was the main girl I was talking to.

Rob Schmitz: So you have a clear recollection of meeting somebody who was 13 years old?

Mike Daisey: Yes.
Rob Schmitz: And twelve years old?

Mike Daisey: Yes of the girl who was thirteen and her friends who represented themselves as being around her age and so the spread there is just an effort to cover the ages that I suspect they are around that age.
 

Ira Glass: Mike did somebody actually say 12, or did somebody say they were 13 and then you looked at group and you’re like OK, maybe one’s 12?
 
M: Yes one person said they were 13. The others with her, and those were the friends I talk about.

Ira Glass: But none said them said they were 12, right? Like, you have one who gave age who was 13, and the others didn’t actually give their ages and you’re just kind of guessing.
 

Mike Daisey: That’s correct. That’s accurate.

Rob Schmitz: Let’s talk about the hexane poisoned workers. Cathy says that you did not talk to workers who were poisoned by hexane and were shaking uncontrollably.
 

Mike Daisey: That’s correct. I met workers in Hong Kong going to Apple protests who had not been poisoned by hexane but had known people who had been, and it was like a constant conversation we were having about those workers. So no, they were not at that meeting.

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. 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 been talking about.
 
Ira Glass: So you didn’t meet any worker who’d been poisoned by hexane?

 
Mike Daisey: That’s correct. 

Daisey has not just said these things in his show and on This American Life. The script of his monologue, which is called “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” was posted online, for anyone to download for free and then perform. In the first 48 hours, 42,000 people downloaded it, according to Daisey.  

 
Since he appeared on This American Life he’s been in the press constantly... 
in newspapers and magazines...he’s written op-eds, he’s been on television programs and online news sites ... he’s become one of the most visible outspoken critics of Apple, and he usually says things like this, from an appearance on MSNBC a month ago: 

[CLIP MSNBC ]

 
I saw all the things that everyone’s been reporting. I saw underage 
workers, I talked to workers who were 13, 14, 15 years old, I met 
people whose hands have ben destroyed by doing the same motion again and again on the line.

HOST: Making Apple products?

MD: Yes! [FADE UNDER] carpal tunnel on a scale you can hardly imagine.

Making products

 
 
Rob Schmitz: Thing is, people believe he saw these things. 
 
And except for the n-hexane, Daisey insisted in our interview that he did see them. 
 
Talking to Daisey was exhausting. There were so many details that didn’t check out, and even when he admitted that he didn’t see what he claimed he saw, he’d qualify it with something. For instance he admitted that he didn’t go on the exit ramp with Cathy like he says in the monologue .... but insisted that the whole thing did happen ... it’s just that Cathy wasn’t there. 
 
He insisted that he did see the inside of workers’ dorm rooms, but admitted, no, there are no cameras there like he claims in his monologue. There are only cameras in the hallways. 
 

It was never simple. He never just said: “I lied.”   

Rob Schmitz: Does it matter if the things you’ve said in this play are untrue? 

Mike Daisey: Yeah I think the truth always matters, truth is tremendously important. I don’t live in a subjective universe where everything is up for grabs. I really do believe that stories should be subordinate to the truth.
 
Rob Schmitz: Then in parts of this why didn’t you tell the truth?
 
Mike Daisey: Everything that’s in this monologue is built out of the trip I took and time I spent on the ground. So I don’t know that I would accept that interpretation. I don’t know that I would agree with that. 
 

The morning after this interview, Ira and I called Cathy, to see one last time if we could square Mike’s story with hers. 
 
We asked her a bunch of questions: Were you and Mike ever separated at the gates of Foxconn? Could that have been when he met the 13 year old? She said no, she doesn’t remember any time when they were separated. Did Mike ever talk to workers in English? She said no, she doesn’t remember that, and it’s very unlikely the workers would speak English.  

Cathy says some things from Daisey’s monologue were true: He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. They did pose as business people in the factories they visited.  
And before they did that, Daisey did have a conversation with her about his plan. She says this conversation probably happened on June 2nd when she first met Daisey. He told her that he would pretend to be a businessman and he needed her help. Here’s how he tells the story:

 
 
[CLIP] Mike Daisey: And she listens to this, and she says, but you are not a businessman. And I say, that's true, I am not a businessman. And she says, and you aren't going to buy their products. I say, that's true, I'm not going to buy their products. And she says, you will lie to them. And I say, yes Cathy, I'm going to lie to lots of people. 

That part, says Cathy, was true.