If you look at the fabrications, they weren't even necessary to make the story more entertaining. Lies like "the guards had guns" and "I met the hexane-n victims" just make him look more heroic, daring, and groundbreaking than he actually was.
The true story would have been entertaining enough for me, but apparently wasn't good enough for Mike Daisey's vanity.
One of the unfortunate aspects of this episode is that, as Daisey says, the problems he discusses are mostly real. He didn't have to lie.
For example, he could have talked about the N-Hexane poisoning without lying. He could have cited news reports, or traveled to interview people, or done it over the phone, or even gotten the info from secondhand interviews. He could have said "imagine a man who..." and proceeded to paint a painful picture based on the facts that were already public.
But he didn't. He chose to pretend he had met these people. He would say that made the story more emotionally impactful, and maybe that's true. But it also poisoned it. It was a very condescending move to pull on his audiences; there is neither artistic nor factual integrity in it.
If he had stuck to the facts, he would still have had a great performance. Too bad.
My biggest problem with Daisey? The fact that the only thing he gains from his fabrications is self-aggrandizement.
So many of the things he claims to have seen aren't in essence untrue: hexane poisoning did happen, he just didn't meet (and tell a true story) about how. Underage workers do exist, but I think it is less than clear whether Daisy met any of them. Terrible abuses resulting in lasting, terrible physical damage (or death) clearly are occurring, but Daisey isn't the one uncovering them, he isn't the heroic reporter interviewing the victims to reveal their plight.
When Daisey defends his work, he's really defending himself as the champion of the oppressed. This, I think, is really about his ego, not about the plight of any abused Chinese worker.
Wrong. Mike Daisey presented his lies AS FACTS to reputable news organizations.
I'm not wrong. I said that he's not a journalist, and that's true. He's a playwright.
Beyond that, and beyond what I heard him say on This American Life, I have no idea. The man could be a pathological liar. But he's not a journalist, and never pretended to be one.
For me, the real story is the cover-up that occurred when he reported his story years ago. He did the right thing in terms of public safety and got called a liar.
As revealed in the trial(s), that's not true. He continuously promoted that false story for many years, even after he first started running into legal trouble as a result.
I thought he did a good job too, but I think that lying at all, even about little details in order to have a more coherent, compelling story about an important topic poisons the whole thing, because it brings into question the author's credibility. You have to decide for yourself when he's finished lying and is now telling the truth.
In this particular case, I think it's safe to just take his story as fiction (even though some of it is true), since there are plenty of other journalists covering the same topic. It's just a shame that he felt he couldn't just tell Ira from the beginning what was storytelling and what was reporting, since his piece was so well done, and he really did not need to mislead or lie in order to be compelling.
I guess I was wondering if I should be mad because I didn't find it that fascinating of a story. I personally know multiple people who have told more fantastic lies than the ones this guy has told. Admittedly the way the story was framed I was almost expecting it to be about him killing his partner and becoming a serial killer expert to explore his guilt, so the lie that it never happened seemed tame in comparison.
Narratives about people’s motivations and goals seem to hold much more weight than the objective facts, which is that he published information that was true, that the public did not have prior.
The true story would have been entertaining enough for me, but apparently wasn't good enough for Mike Daisey's vanity.
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