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Mike Check: Reading Between the Lines of the Daisey Story

As an intern at the Believer in 2005, Jim Fingal was assigned to fact-check John D'Agata's article on the 2002 suicide of Las Vegas teenager Levi Presley. The article appeared in 2010, and the factchecking process forms the basis of the book "_The...

As an intern at the Believer in 2005, Jim Fingal was assigned to fact-check John D’Agata’s article on the 2002 suicide of Las Vegas teenager Levi Presley. The article appeared in 2010, and the factchecking process forms the basis of the book The Lifespan of a Fact.

The retraction of This American Life‘s Mike Daisey monologue over a number of inaccuracies has made one thing clear: Ira Glass would make a terrifying spurned lover. The public reckoning, the long, painful silences, the hurt tone, the turning of his partner’s own words against them (Daisey: “I’m going… to lie… to lots… of people.”) For the listener, hearing this evokes voyeurism, empathy, and maybe a touch of schadenfreude. But also anger and betrayal.

The genre conventions of this sort of ritual, as they’ve developed over the years, go a little bit like this:

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  • Artist attracts the attention of Cultural Guardian
  • Cultural Guardian champions the work and spreads it to many, many people
  • Artist, it turns out, has not been entirely forthcoming about the nature of their work
  • Cultural Guardian learns that the work was not what they thought it was
  • Artist gets trotted out for a day of reckoning

And, certainly, that desire for reckoning on the part of the Artist is certainly understandable in a pragmatic sense—there is risk involved in championing someone else’s work. There is a desire to act swiftly and mercilessly to prevent any further loss to their personal credibility, but also to punish a personal betrayal too (Glass: “I stuck my neck out for you;” Oprah’s response to James Frey: “I feel really duped”).

That feeling of betrayal extends far beyond the studio or the theater, to a wider audience of commentators, many of whom may not have ever heard the additional work, despite their confidence that they have something interesting to say about it.

Yet what does that impulse mean, that feeling of betrayal, and where does it lead us? For example, there is a tendency in coverage of the Daisey controversy to call the performer, a writer, a “liar,” and label his individual fictions “lies.” But lying involves a certain intentionality. What is the nature of Daisey’s lies? In this situation, who has he lied to? He has clearly lied to This American Life on numerous occasions. Though he’s never pretended to be a journalist per se, he has repeated falsehoods as a talking head on news shows. And his accounts carry the weight of an eyewitness, someone who went there and saw things. And while his performances have been labeled as comedy — a genre where fact and fiction can’t help but slip around — his This American Life monologue engulfed us in a way most laugh-out-loud comedy shows can’t: it made us feel something like care and concern for a complicated issue that relates to us.

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So maybe we were lied to, betrayed. Then again, if his story is fictive to begin with then calling his individual inventions “lies” only sustains confusion, obscures the question of what “fiction” or “memoir” mean, or what we mean by “eyewitness,” or “journalism.” In this case, arguably the “lie” to the audience is one of mislabeling: the artist’s work presented as journalism, in the context of cold, hard facts, when it is instead something else.

But “lies” are what people call these stories, and there is a purgative, emotional effect in doing so. No one likes to have wool pulled over their eyes, to have the chair pulled out from beneath them, to be hoodwinked, to be cheated. How betrayed and annoyed you feel likely corresponds to a combination of your skepticism and emotional engagement: whether you think it was a personal attack, a dick move, or a sin of omission likely depends on whether or not the thought ever crossed your mind that “there is something a little fishy about this.” That feeling might be additionally compounded by a sense of embarrassment at having been duped before, or if you are optimistically predisposed to believe a certain simplified narrative rather than the complex, messier reality underneath it (hi, Kony 2012.).

But framing Daisey as a liar might be putting his own story into another simplistic narrative. If we take him Daisey at his word in the “Retraction” piece, he knew what he was doing, and while he ultimately thought his trade-off a worthy one, he was conflicted about it.

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I think I was terrified that if I untied these things, that the work, that I know is really good, and tells a story, that does these really great things for making people care, that it would come apart in a way where, where it would ruin everything.

Situational Truth

Daisey stumbled upon a rare opportunity to tell his story to millions and then intentionally lied in the name of what he saw as the greater good. That certainly doesn’t excuse him — he could have pulled the plug at any time, no one twisted his arm to lead TAL on. He had the opportunity to “do the right thing” and didn’t. But, like the Foxconn story, Daisey’s story isn’t black and white. It’s complicated by his convictions, and by our own, whatever they are.

The costs of his violation have been enumerated across the Internet (James Fallows has made the argument that Daisey’s controversy will hurt the Western press and international worker-rights groups in China, in the most dammning damage account I’ve seen). This American Life’s reputation has been called into question, and the saga could render another blow to the public’s already waning confidence in journalists. More charitable journalism hounds (if such a thing existed) might also read the retraction as more proof of the profession’s interest in transparency and determination to correct mistakes.

And yet, in the interest of correction, there is still a gaping grey area left unaddressed by all the talk of “journalism” and our consumption of it: the continuum of artistic documentary work that we tolerate and that we don’t. There are certain artists whose indiscretions we’ve accepted, or at least forgiven or made excuses for given the quality of their work. In a recent Salon piece about David Foster Wallace’s journalism, for example, Daniel Roberts excuses Wallace’s nonfiction work for its inaccuracies, and even re-affirms the title of journalist despite Wallace’s lack of adherence to any journalistic code:

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In October, during a New Yorker Festival event, Jonathan Franzen stirred up some drama when he told David Remnick that “David [Foster Wallace] and I disagreed on,” as Remnick raised it, a “view of fact and fiction” and the “dividing line” between the two. Remnick, aghast, asked if Wallace “said it was OK to make up dialogue on a cruise ship” and Franzen confirmed that, indeed, he did. Pushing aside for a moment the question of why Franzen even felt the need to randomly interject about Wallace (and the jealous, complicated feelings Franzen has demonstrated publicly for his friend), the idea that Wallace’s occasional use of invented dialogue makes him, by definition, not a journalist is a laughable one. [emphasis added] … If he did on occasion tweak direct quotes, it didn’t affect the truth of the situations, and if anything likely got closer to a representation of truth, at least the personal, first-person narrator sort of truth that the cruise-ship piece and others like it aimed to convey. The cruise piece, among many others, delivers an extremely satisfying, complete representation of Wallace’s own personal experience (a very bad one) on the cruise, and if altering dialogue served to better crystallize and define that experience, then it’s still truthful, no matter what David Remnick or his fact-checkers would say.

How is David Foster Wallace’s defense that “I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one” (yet having his work published in Journals) different from Daisey’s “it’s not journalism… It’s theater”? Is it because Wallace was independently known as a fiction writer? Or because he was highly esteemed by the literati? Even though The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was well-received by critics before earning a This American Life treatment, Daisey was a relative unknown until now. Does that make him an easier target?

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Or, is it the audience that matters, or the kind of story they’re hearing? The readers of David Foster Wallace’s journalism probably knew him first through his fiction, while Daisey and Frey were propelled to stardom on the basis of provocative, eye-opening works. When a work that operates by one set of rules – the conventions of monologists or memoirists – is catapulted into another realm – that of fact-based journalism – the author must be prepared for an audience he may have never imagined when he wrote the work to begin with.

Little white lines

When it comes to imbibing the “truth,” we are comfortable with a continuum of discrepancies and paradoxes, even if we don’t always explicitly acknowledge them. We’re okay with fictional radio programs that we may encounter in media res, thinking they are true, provided there is a disclaimer before or after. We accept some degree of editing in interviews, and are mostly okay with things being combined, with grammar being corrected and filler words removed. On the radio, we’re willing to trade the awkward verite of recorded interviews for slickly edited and recombined pieces, in which everyone is very articulate, enunciates clearly and keeps the conversation flowing with a singular logic.

We’re generally not okay with additions, though some sins are more egregious than others; some are “liberties” rather than “betrayals.” If a writer is describing her personal history, we’re probably willing to allow them, for instance, replacing waffles for pancakes as their grandmother’s signature breakfast item.

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Those lines seem intuitive and natural enough. But one might ask: Is there something inevitable about those boundaries? In another place or time, might these inter-genre boundaries be drawn along different lines, becoming either more restrictive or more lenient?

The answer to the inevitable question of “why they did it” is sometimes the most interesting and least predictable part of this sort of narrative. In the “Retraction” episode of This American Life, Daisey manages to eek out a case for the sort of art that he does, which comes off rather flat in the face of Glass’s rebuttals. (It’s his show, after all.) But what does Daisey’s argument look like if we take it on it’s own terms, and imagine it was being made independent of this controversy? If we allowed him to non-penitent monologue about it? A condensed version of what he told Ira, editing out the apologies and silences and hedges, might look like:

Everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end – to make people care. It’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes – has made – other people delve. I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms, that we have different languages for what the truth means.

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If that was something that he actually declared with confidence, that might actually be a somewhat compelling argument about a particular genre of work performed in a particular context, particularly if you think about it in the abstract, as something that was composed largely before it became a thing on This American Life.

It’s Art

One thing that is easy to forget in cases where journalism “fails” is the non-trivial role that the storyteller plays in shaping a narrative capable of winning over so many people in the first place. So many people find Daisey’s message compelling because he is a damned good storyteller. Daisey did succeed in getting a lot of people to think more about the human costs of their technology products, a legacy that even in the wake of the controversy isn’t likely to die. It seems the bulk of the content within the story – with some exceptions (guards with guns, the number of underage workers) – were things that in fact have been independently verified as things that do happen, even if the particularly poignant scenes didn’t in fact happen to Daisey. Seen through this lens, Daisey’s line of thinking begins to make some sense, and he seems to have actually succeeded in achieving his theatrical and social goals.

But art is never something that happens in the abstract. It always has a context. To whatever extent we might find Daisey’s argument for that particular genre of theater compelling, equally compelling is the objection raised against it, that appeals less to theory than pragmatism:

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Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk – people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word.

And:

Mike Daisey: Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important. Ira Glass: I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says ‘this happened to me,’ I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labeled as ‘here’s a work of fiction.’

Is there room for both to be right? What if Daisey was right that people going to the theater – or to a comedy show – should engage with the work they see differently than the articles they read in the newspaper? Do we owe it to the artist to learn a little more about their intentions beforehand? How should the artist best cater to the audience? Does an artist need to provide a disclaimer before each performance?

In a free society it’s important to allow people to make art we disagree with, but we’re also allowed to get mad at that art, and dispute its worth.

The day after the “Retraction” episode aired, Daisey prefaced his final New York show (his upcoming Chicago run has been cancelled) with a disclaimer (mp3), and showed he has a bit of fire left in him:

As an audience, that is your role, to determine how you feel about the art you take in.

We’re still learning our lines.

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