Mike Daisey - This American Life Controversy

This American Life Controversy

In January 2012, portions of Daisey's monologue "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" about conditions at the Chinese company Foxconn which makes most products for Apple, were aired on the radio program This American Life. The episode, titled "Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory" quickly became the most downloaded episode in the show's history, with 888,000 downloads.

Two months later, This American Life officially retracted the episode, having discovered that some of the claims made by Daisey had apparently been dramatized. A follow up episode, entitled "Retraction", stood by the veracity of the claims Daisey had made about working conditions at Foxconn, but claimed Daisey had dramatized many first-hand details of his own experiences visiting China. Among other things, Daisey was accused of exaggerating the number of plants he visited and people he talked to, of claiming that the plant guards had guns, of exaggerating the number of underaged workers he talked to, and of inventing a story of worker with a crippled hand using an iPad for the first time. This American Life also accused Daisey of purposefully misleading them by trying to prevent them from contacting the translator he used in order to fact check his story. In an interview with host Ira Glass, Daisey admitted to giving the producers of This American Life a false name for the translator and also admitted that he lied about her contact information being changed.

After the firestorm of the episode, Daisey reformed his work and has continued to perform it, removing the five minutes of contested details and standing by his assertions that the conditions in Apple's supply chain violate China's own labor laws and remain inhumane.