Media Ethics: Issues and Cases 8th Edition by Philip Patterson, Lee Wilkins

Exercise 5

NPR, the New York Times and Working Conditions in China
LEE WILKINS
University of Missouri
On January 6, 2012, Ira Glass, host of Chicago Public Media This American Life, devoted a 39-minute segment to a report on working conditions at manufacturing plants in China.
The show was based extensively on a single source, Mike Daisey, who recounted what he had seen and what he had been told through an interpreter on a visit to a Foxconn factory in China, a plant that makes parts for the popular iPhone and iPad. Daisey recounted stories about working conditions and stated some workers in the plant had been poisoned during the manufacturing process.
Less than a month later, the New York Times ran a series of investigative stories on working conditions at Chinese plants making Apple products (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costsfor-workers-in-china.html?pagewanted=all).
"Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" quickly became the most popular This American Life podcast, with about 880,000 downloads. Daisey, a performance artist, became something of a celebrity and Apple critic, granting numerous interviews about his experiences. Faced with the publicity, Apple responded, announcing that it would for the first time allow third-party inspections of its Chinese manufacturing facilities.
National Public Radio's marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz also had spent a great deal of time in China and reported on working conditions there. He, too, heard the Mr. Daisey segment-and he told his bosses at NPR that there were facts included in it that did not ring true. He was given the go-ahead to do independent reporting.
Less than three months later, Glass aired the following retraction (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory/):
I have difficult news. We've learned that Mike Daisey's story about Apple in China-which we broadcast in January-contained significant fabrications. We're retracting the story because we can't vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey's acclaimed one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.
The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week's episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory."
Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn't excuse the fact that we never should've put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.
Subsequent inspections at Foxconn plants did reveal numerous violations of agreements to working conditions there. Daisey, in subsequent interviews, has said that while the specifics of his allegations were fabrications, the overall indictment of Apple is "true."
Is Mike Daisey right-even though his facts were wrong? Was the overall story "true"? What definition of truth do you use in responding to this question?