ira glass – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Can You Take Fact Checking Too Far?

from the maybe-possibly dept

Earlier this year, there was a lot of attention paid to the popular radio program This American Life (TAL) having to retract its episode based on storyteller Mike Daisey’s one-man show, in which he claimed to be telling a story about his own trip to visit Apple factories in China, but which it later came out was partially fabricated. As we noted soon after that, when it comes to pure storytelling, it’s not always clear that fact checking makes sense. Storytelling is a tool for entertainment, not journalism. Where those two things come into conflict is when people begin to blur the lines between entertainment and journalism.

Since then, of course, TAL has become, shall we say, a lot more vigilant about fact checking. In a recent episode of another radio program, On The Media, TAL host Ira Glass talked about the importance of fact checking and how they realize they can’t get caught again. Glass says the audience will likely forgive them once, but not twice. In a Reddit AMA that Glass did a few weeks ago, he explained that TAL has hired professional fact checkers:

We used to fact check the way they do on the daily NPR news shows (where I worked before doing this show): editors and reporters consult about questionable facts, rundown stuff in an ad hoc way.

Now we have professional fact checkers for everything, including the personal essays.

However, he also notes that, when it comes to “storytelling” it’s not always so easy, using regular TAL contributor David Sedaris as the example:

Still a question is what to do about David Sedaris. He doesn’t pretend the stories are true. He says to everyone they’re “true enough for you.” I assume the audience can tell, he’s a funny writer, there may be exaggerations for comic effect. We have three choices: 1) assume the audience is smart enough to tell; 2) label his stuff on the air as possibly non-factual (hard to figure out a way to do that which doesn’t kill the fun but there probably is one); 3) fact check him the way the New Yorker does. I honestly don’t know where I stand on this one. When I pose the Q to public radio audiences, at speeches and events, they overwhelmingly vote #1, with a vociferous tiny minority who feel strongly in favor of #2.

But, as an avid TAL listener, in the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that they do seem to be going overboard with the fact checking. In episode 476 from a few weeks ago, there’s a story of a teenager bitten by a shark and the aftermath (it’s a somewhat horrifying story). And yet, in the middle of the story, there’s a break where they admit that they could not confirm she was actually bitten by a shark — and some think it was a different sea creature responsible. No one denies that she was attacked and bitten and came close to dying, in part through a series of mishaps. But they feel the need to fact check the possibility that it wasn’t a shark. I’m not sure what that adds to the story (other than immediately making me think of Mike Daisey).

Then, in the very next episode, from last weekend, there’s the hilarious story from comedian Molly Shannon, which I’d first heard on Marc Maron’s (insanely brilliant) podcast, WTF, about how, as a kid, she and a friend — with the active encouragement of Molly’s father — successfully stowed away on a flight from Cleveland to NYC. But at the very end… Glass chimes in to say that TAL fact checkers reached out to Molly’s friend — who had no idea Molly had told the story publicly, but who confirmed all the details in the story. Once again, all I could think of was… “Mike Daisey strikes again.” The story is hilarious, whether or not it’s true, and I wonder if it really needs fact checking.

It may just be a case of “once bitten…” but fact checking minute details of random entertaining stories really feels like overkill. And it actually has me thinking about another recent podcast/radio show (also associated with NPR), Radiolab, which recently had an entire episode on the nature of facts, and trying to figure out what is a fact. The episode has since been marred in its own controversy over the segment called Yellow Rain, in which they sought to try to understand the “truth” behind whether or not there were really chemical attacks on the Hmong in Laos in 1975. The segment culminates with Kao Kalia Yang (who is translating for her uncle Eng Yang) getting extremely angry at the Radiolab crew, as the Yangs felt that they were set up by the radio program, somewhat as stooges, because Eng talked about the “yellow rain” chemical attacks, and Radiolab wanted his response to the research of scientists who argue no such chemical attack ever existed. It’s very intense — and a situation that I felt really did make their point pretty strongly that “truth” isn’t always as easy to discern as people think, because it’s often not quite as black and white as people imagine.

Radiolab had to clarify and later offer an apology to those who felt that the interview was unfair, overly confrontational, insulting or minimizing the plight of the Hmong. Unfortunately, I think that obscures the much more interesting point that they were actually making with that story — which I don’t think did minimize the experiences of the Hmong at all, but rather highlighted how, even if the actual explanation of what happened differed from how they viewed it, what they did experience was horrific.

However, unlike the TAL stories, perhaps you could argue that Radiolab effectively took fact checking too far in a different direction — in that they were using it to challenge some of the life-defining moments of some people. I actually side with the Radiolab folks there, in that I think they did exactly what they should have done as journalists, in coming across facts that go against the narrative, though the way it was handled could have been done more sensitively.

Either way, this handful of stories and events, once again, seems to highlight how fact checking isn’t quite as simple a proposition as some would like it to be. We all have fun calling out stories where reporters make mistakes — they happen all the time. And often, it’s because of lazy or sloppy journalism — in which case it’s quite reasonable to call things out. But not everything is a black and white issue all the time, even when it comes to fact checking.

Filed Under: fact checking, ira glass, molly shannon, radiolab, this american life, yellow rain

Mike Birbiglia & Ira Glass Trying To Skype Into Every Viewing Party Of Their Movie

from the connecting-with-fans dept

If you haven’t heard, comedian Mike Birbiglia and _This American Life_‘s Ira Glass made a movie, called Sleepwalk With Me, based on Birbiglia’s act/one man show/book (all of which are hilarious). They did it as a small indie production and have been going crazy coming up with cool ways to connect with fans and get them to support the movie — such as by doing a ridiculous number of live Q&As, creating cool videos, having a “war” with Joss Whedon, and much much more. Their latest move is particularly cool. The video has now come up on various Video On Demand (VOD) platforms, and they’ve been encouraging people to hold viewing parties at home tonight… and to make it more fun, they’re going to try to Skype or Google Chat into as many of them as possible:

I’m curious as to just how many they’ll be able to do — and how long they’ll talk to anyone (and how well they’ll go), but I’m looking forward to seeing the results. Either way, it’s yet another cool way of connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy (CwF+RtB) that’s been enabled by the digital age.

Filed Under: cwf+rtb, ira glass, mike birbiglia, sleepwalk with me, video on demand, viewing parties

Yes, Public Radio Shows Can Do Cool CwF+RtB Experiments Too

from the keep-it-up dept

One of my favorite radio programs/podcasts is Radiolab. They do absolutely amazing storytelling on really interesting things. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a Radiolab program and then not gone off to talk to someone about it. Their most recent full episode (they also do “shorts”) is a really fascinating exploration of color. The final section, on why Homer (of Iliad & Odyssey fame, not the Simpsons character) never mentioned the color blue is simply brilliant.

That said, it’s also been interesting in the last month or so to watch the Radiolab crew start to embrace some of the ideas that we’ve been exploring for some time, concerning CwF+RtB (Connecting with Fans and giving them a Reason to Buy). I first noticed this about a month ago, when Radiolab announced its Lab Partners premium offering. Just as we’ve seen with artists who offer up content for free, but give people “subscription” style offering for premium features (sorta like our own Crystal Ball offering), Radiolab is giving people a ton of extras if they subscribe.

Some will argue, of course, that this is nothing more than a modern update to the traditional patronage model of public radio — wherein they beg for pledges every so often and you might get a tote bag if you spend enough. And, clearly, the ideas come from the same general place. But there are some key differences — mainly that the premium features aren’t worthless tote bags, but are actually related to the show, and include things like access. So, for example, you can join an editorial chat with the Radiolab team, or, my favorite:

Toss Your Name in the Hat: Enter your first name to a pool of names that we’ll draw from whenever we need to use a made-up character name in a story.

Like many of these kinds of offerings, Radiolabs has a couple tiers to let fans self-select. My one quibble is that I think there aren’t enough tiers — and there isn’t a really low entry-level tier. In watching these kinds of experiments, at least having a very low level of support as an option can really help get more people involved and build up the buzz for a program. But, either way, it’s neat.

Of course, that’s not all Radiolab is doing. They really are doing a lot on the “CwF” side of things too. They’ve done a number of touring live shows (where they often bring along great musicians, like Zoe Keating). But they’ve also just launched a remix contest for the show. Remix contests are nothing new in the music world, but I’ve never heard of one for a radio show/podcast before. But they’re doing the same basic thing — releasing the stems, allowing you to re-score the music, etc.

If you’ve never listened to a Radiolab production, you might not understand why it would ever make sense to remix a radio show. But, the level of production that goes into every Radiolab episode is astounding. And they do a great job with how they reveal stories and plots. I’m honestly not sure that anyone could actually do a better job editing together an episode of Radiolab than host Jad Abumrad, but I’m actually really curious to hear what other fans can come up with.

As a brief aside, last fall, another great radio/podcast story teller, Ira Glass, from This American Life, did a thorough writeup of why Radiolab is so amazing, and it goes into some amount of detail about how Jad and Robert put together an episode. I think anyone seeking to remix an episode of Radiolab might learn a bunch of useful things from reading it.

Either way, I always think it’s great to see more and more people in various areas start embracing these basic concepts and doing really cool things with them. At this stage, it’s really just a bunch of experiments, but that’s how amazing new things happen.

Filed Under: connect with fans, contest, ira glass, patronage, radiolab, reason to buy, remix

Storytelling, Truth And Consequences

from the not-everything-is-just-a-story dept

I really like telling stories. Quite a bit. At times, my friends will make fun of me for this, because if there’s an opportunity when hanging out to tell a story, I often can’t resist. An old friend has referred to it as “uncle Mike’s story time.” My wife likes to joke about the stories I use often — that these are “date stories” — because I probably told her a bunch of them back when we were dating, and she assumes that I told them to others prior to her as well (that might be true). She numbers the most common ones (e.g., “date story 37”) to highlight how frequently I use some of them.

Of course, as someone who likes to tell stories, I also love listening to stories — both for the stories themselves, but also for the craft of storytelling. In the last few years, in particular, I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts that really focus on storytelling — The Moth, This American Life, Snap Judgment, Radiolab. They’re all fantastic. Of course, if you’re just doing pure storytelling for the sake of amusing or entertaining people you’re talking to… a certain amount of embellishment can happen. Hell, it can be common and almost expected. Not all my stories do that, but there are a few that would be just that much better if you change a little thing here or there. I once thought it might be fun to put a bunch of my usual stories (the “date stories” I guess) into a book, in which each story would include one exaggeration or outright falsehood — and the final “chapter” would be to explore what was not quite true in each story, and why I used it (and if it was really necessary). I still think this would be fun to do if I ever actually had the time (I don’t).

I’ve been thinking about this a bit following all of the controversy over This American Life’s big retraction of the Mike Daisey episode, in which he used that storyteller’s license to exaggerate key parts of the story about what he saw in China when he went to check out the Foxconn factories where Apple products are made. On Sunday, Daisey finally gave the apology he should have given a week ago, in which he admitted that he fabricated and exaggerated in the interest of the story, and that in doing so he didn’t live up to his own standards.

But what’s interested me even more is that I’ve seen a few different people call attention to the fact that others have called out This American Life in the past for supposed “true stories” that turned out to be anything but. Four years ago, for example, Jack Shaffer at Slate called out Malcolm Gladwell and TAL for a story that Gladwell did on TAL about his “experience” as a young reporter at The Washington Post (now the owner of Slate). That story was actually done for The Moth — a regular storytelling event/group/thing, where the key thing is the story, not so much the truth. Almost exactly a year before that, there was a similar article in The New Republic, by Alex Heard, calling out TAL and contributor David Sedaris in a ridiculously long article highlighting a bunch of fact checks that suggest Sedaris’ famed stories aren’t always in the same time zone as the truth. There have also been other “memoir”-type stories on TAL that I would be willing to bet were similarly exaggerated.

Some have questioned why This American Life did a full hour episode on the Mike Daisey situation, but brushed off the criticism of Gladwell and Sedaris. And I think what it comes down to is exactly the reason it took Daisey so long to come to terms with why people were so upset about his story. Daisey comes from a tradition that is much closer to where Gladwell and Sedaris’ stories came from: to entertain people, not to make a larger point. Daisey has been an active public storyteller for a decade or so (he’s also active in The Moth). The problem was that with The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, he went past storyteller into advocate.

He wasn’t just trying to entertain. He was trying to make people “aware” and to make a difference. When you shift from one mode to the other, the rules change. And Daisey missed that.

The thing is, it’s really not hard to separate the two. I don’t tell exaggerated stories on Techdirt, in part because this isn’t a “storytelling” forum, but also because this site depends on everything on it being as credible as possible. It’s quite easy for me to understand the context and when the discussion is real and important, and when I’m just talking with some friends about a funny story. Similarly, I have no reason to doubt Gladwell’s detailed research works (even if there are reasonable complaints about his occasional mistakes) include purposeful embellishments “for the story.” Context matters and I think most people can separate them when talking about different subjects.

The issue with Diasey was that he took the storytelling tradition, and tried to make it out to be a “news” story in which he was really seeking to get things to happen. And that’s where things fell down. If you’re going to do that, your story has to check out. I’m not bothered by Gladwell or Sedaris’ exaggerations (though I must admit to not finding Sedaris that entertaining — but Gladwell’s WaPo story is hilarious). If Daisey was just telling stories for the sake of storytelling, there wouldn’t be an issue. But as soon as he made the story part of a campaign to create change, he had a responsibility to be factual. That he couldn’t separate the two was a major mistake, and it’s not even clear that his apology fully recognizes that fact.

Storytelling is a useful tool for entertainment. Storytelling can also be helpful in the interest of causing people to change behavior or to become aware of some real situations, but there are different standards that people expect in that kind of storytelling, and failing to live up to those ideals has serious consequences, as Daisey is starting to figure out now.

Filed Under: china, ira glass, journalism, mike daisey, monologue, production, rob schmitz, story telling, this american life, working conditions

This American Life Retracts Entire Episode About Apple Factories After Mike Daisey Admits To Fabricating Parts Of The Story

from the wow dept

This is pretty big. Last month, we wrote about a This American Life episode that focused on the Foxconn factories where Apple products are made, based on a one-man show by Mike Daisey. I wrote about a few key points in the episode — including some of the more interesting claims from those who were used to “fact check” his story. Apparently, that fact check did not go nearly far enough. Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, who is quite familiar with the factories in China, found large parts of the story questionable, and did some followup reporting, finding Daisey’s translator and discovering that things Daisey said turned out not to be true. He then confronted Daisey with Ira Glass from TAL, and got Daisey to admit that he fabricated parts of the story, though he still appears to be in denial about how bad this looks:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic – not a theatrical – enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

The problem, of course, is that it now appears that many of the things he was claiming weren’t actually true of the plants he wrote about. There was one story that recounted events that did happen, but at a different plant 1,000 miles away, and which Daisey did not witness at all.

In the meantime, This American Life has retracted the entire show (link is down as of right now), and apparently plans to air a new show today that details what happened and has a detailed apology from Ira Glass (who just recently on the show was telling listeners to go see Daisey’s full one man show).

It is true that Daisey is a storyteller, not a reporter, and that’s fine in the right context. But once it got to the point that journalistic outfits were reporting on his story — or even letting him repeat it on the air, he had every responsibility to be clear about the parts that were simply fabricated.

Filed Under: china, ira glass, mike daisey, monologue, production, rob schmitz, this american life, working conditions
Companies: apple, foxconn