Well, it turns out that Mr. Daisey was less than thoroughly truthful about his time spent in Shenzhen. A full episode of "This American Life" was devoted to retracting many of the claims, as described in this article:
TL;DR: Yes, life can suck for people who manufacture our favourite toys, but it isn't quite as bad as reported, and some of the worst stuff was just made up.The New York Times wrote:Speaking Less Than Truth to Power
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: March 18, 2012
The controversy that has erupted over Mike Daisey’s solo stage show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” raises a knotty issue that deserves examination in the light of the increasingly blurred lines, in various media, between entertainment and journalism.
On Friday the public-radio program “This American Life” retracted a segment that it broadcast in January about Mr. Daisey’s show, which exposed unsavory practices at the Foxconn factories in China where Apple products are made. The theatrical version has been a hit at the Public Theater, returning for another engagement that ended on Sunday after a largely sold-out run in the fall. (The monologue is to run at the Woolly Mammoth theater in Washington this summer.) After broadcasting the segment, the producers of “This American Life” had been alerted by Rob Schmitz, a reporter for another public-radio program, “Marketplace,” that some of the first-person testimony presented by Mr. Daisey in the radio version of the show was dubious.
In his own statement on Friday Mr. Daisey said: “What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.” He also said he regretted allowing parts of his work to be heard in the context of a factual program.
Mr. Daisey may not claim to be a journalist, but there is little question that in his show, which he has been performing since 2010, he gives no indication that some of the events he describes as having witnessed himself were embellished or based on incidents that took place elsewhere. The program at the Public Theater described it as “nonfiction.”
Nonfiction should mean just that: facts and nothing but the facts. For its part the Public released a statement saying: “Mike is an artist, not a journalist. Nevertheless, we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn’t his personal experience in the piece.”
Certainly Mr. Daisey uses language more evocative than a reporter would in describing his encounters with workers at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. But in an hourlong segment of “This American Life” released for broadcast on Friday that delved into the reasons behind the retraction, it became clear that this was not a matter of reordering events or using colorful description for maximum theatrical effect, but of presenting as firsthand experience incidents that never happened.
The episode is agonizing listening for anyone who admired Mr. Daisey’s show, as I did. In an interview with Ira Glass, host of “This American Life,” Mr. Daisey is evasive, obfuscatory and occasionally contrite in responding to questions about how his version of events differs from that of the interpreter, Cathy Lee, whom he hired to interview Foxconn workers in Shenzhen. (It does not reflect well on Mr. Daisey that he initially told the producers that the translator’s name was Anna, and that he had no way of contacting her; a Google search readily turned up Ms. Lee.) When pressed about his trustworthiness, he told Mr. Glass in the most recent program, “You can trust my word in the context of the theater.”
The problem is Mr. Daisey’s particular brand of theater is experienced by the audience as direct and honest testimony to events that he witnessed. (His previous monologues include “The Last Cargo Cult,” about the financial system, and “How Theater Failed America.”) This is also known as reporting, which is journalism. The weight, authority, emotional power and — like it or not, theatricality — of “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” derive precisely from the assumption that Mr. Daisey is telling the truth about the events he describes.
I certainly believed that the stories Mr. Daisey told — of seeing guards with guns at the Foxconn factory, of interviewing a 13-year-old girl who worked at the factory, of talking to an elderly former Foxconn worker whose hand had been destroyed — were true. According to Ms. Lee and the producers of “This American Life,” they were not.
Documentary theater has become a small but steady slice of New York theatrical life in the past decade or so, with companies like the Civilians drawing the texts of their work directly from interviews with people involved in the subjects they pursue. A polemical point of view is often part of the package: as Jason Zinoman pointed out in an article in The New York Times, it was clear from the Civilians’ show “In the Footprint,” about the battle over the Atlantic Yards redevelopment project in Brooklyn, that the show’s authors were sympathetic to the activists battling the plan. But the testimony they drew on, from both sides of the issue, came from the actual words spoken by the characters being depicted, including public figures like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
Similarly we don’t expect an evenhanded approach from the filmmaker Michael Moore, who makes no bones about his agendas in his films. But at the movies we have the evidence of our own senses to trust, even if we are aware that editing may play a role in how events are depicted. On “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” which is where many young people turn for news, satire is the standard modus operandi, but the show draws many of its targets directly from the public speech of politicians.
It is in this context that Mr. Daisey presumably felt free to take a little license to fictionalize his facts to expose real abuses. As reporting in The Times and elsewhere has proved, workers in the Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and elsewhere have been subject to sometimes inhumane conditions.
But in his stage shows Mr. Daisey is the sole voice we hear, and while his monologues undoubtedly contain much writing that is obviously opinion, when it comes to describing his experience, we take him at his word. “The truth always matters,” Mr. Daisey said at one point during his recent interview with “This American Life.” “Stories should be subordinate to truth.”
It now seems clear that Mr. Daisey betrayed that precept. He may have been on the side of the angels in seeking to rouse interest in human-rights abuses in Chinese factories, twisting the facts in the service of a larger truth. But theater that aims to shape public opinion by exposing the world’s inequities has no less an obligation than journalism to construct its larger truths only from an accumulation of smaller ones.
In the name of full disclosure, I listened to both the initial report and the retraction, and while I own a couple of Apple products I'm hardly a fanboy. I think "This American Life" handled it about as well as they could have.