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Funny because I regard his show as “story time” and not something I would treat as journalism.
In contrast Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox was a part of their “opinion” lineup and I don’t think regular viewers knew not to trust it as journalism.
When Carlson and Fox won the defamation lawsuit in 2020 it was because “Mr. Carlson’s statements were not statements of fact and that she failed adequately to allege actual malice.”
The “not statements of fact” included the reassurances that Carlson always made, in this case he said “Remember the facts of the case. These are undisputed” followed by clearly disputed and false claims.
The lawyers argued successfully that it should be clear to the viewer that what Carlson says “cannot reasonably be interpreted as fact” even when he says that these are the facts.
Arguably the bigger factor was proving malice, and Carlson seems very careful not to put anything into an email or text that undermines what he says on air.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
This was a different case, but Fox News did have to pay almost 800 million to Dominion to settle the lawsuit about rigged voting machines. There Tucker did admit in text that the allegations were ridiculous, but reported them as if they were true anyways.
And here's the same thing for rachel maddow
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defen...
> and I don’t think regular viewers knew not to trust it as journalism.
Why?
> seems very careful not to put anything into an email or text that undermines what he says
Standard business practice when you are past Junior career level. Next.
What makes this fascinating isn't just what it says about storytelling, but what it reveals about our relationship with truth in media. I worked in public radio for 7 years, and TAL's influence was impossible to overstate - every producer wanted to craft stories with that perfect narrative arc.
The Daisey episode still haunts journalism programs. We used it as a case study in our ethics workshops. The truly unsettling part wasn't just Daisey's fabrications, but how perfectly those lies fit into TAL's storytelling template - dramatic scenes, sympathetic characters, narrative tension, and a tidy resolution that makes you feel something.
Glass wasn't wrong about storytelling's power to make people listen. But the Daisey incident showed its dangers - when your format rewards emotional impact and narrative elegance, you create incentives for sources to deliver exactly that, truthful or not.
The saddest part is that real stories about Foxconn's labor conditions existed that could have been told without fabrication. But they wouldn't have had that perfect "old man touching an iPad for the first time" moment that makes for such a perfect radio beat.
How has the story about the Duke Lacrosse players been processed in the journalism schools?
The funny thing is,
Daisey was not the first time narrative journalism – aka documentary media – has waltzed down the path to fiction.
Famously, we have the film Nanook of the North and the book Wisconsin Death Trip,
case studies I covered when I was in journalism program, before TAL.
Today, we might call these works docudrama,
but the blurring of the line between drama and journalism remains.
And the story is in fact largely true. Daisey is a storyteller, not a journalist, and TAL is not a news program.
The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the get-go... and so should Glass.
TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up by people who themselves are being uncritical.
Arranging facts into a narrative with mass appeal is the craft of journalism.
Everyone gets things wrong sometimes. As important as getting things right is, nobody is perfect. Then, how you react when you make a mistake matters. You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or—best of all—be humble and honest and apply the lessons learned in the future.
Kudos to Ira and his team for doing the right thing after realizing they did the wrong thing.
And to your point, if you are watching this, and trying to cynically use a one-off example to discredit years of reliable journalism, that too is a moment of character, and I think as important as the story itself.
I think this is different. Getting something wrong in journalism is not like a mistake practicing an instrument: reputations and careers are at stake. it calls into doubt the integrity of the whole program.
>You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or—best of all—be humble and honest
If covering up the truth works, why would you risk telling the truth? At worst, the outcome is the same (minor scandal). At best, in most cases, nobody ever learns about the lie. The rational choice is to never tell the truth until it's completely obvious you lied, they e okay dumb.
(Sorry for cynicism. I don't really think like that)
The title refers to the January 6, 2012 episode, beginning about halfway through the article:
> “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication.
On March 16, 2012, This American Life, aired the “Retraction” covering Rob Schmitz’s deconstruction of Daisey’s piece (he uncovered at least thirteen lies).
“Immediately after that we started working with professional fact-checkers,” said Glass.
That they were horrified by the mistake and set out to address it publicly and work to prevent future mistakes is telling.
This American Life is a treasure.
Mike Daisey, the fabricator in question, had a completely headspinning excuse:
>Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve.
It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going to set off nuclear-level alerts.
Or the vice president saying "if I have to create stories so the American media actually pays attention, then that's what I'm going to do."
https://youtu.be/vVJ_Icosa3s?si=urohSO8q_iLFJpg2
There was a biography that came out, I believe roughly around 2004, that was revealed to have significant fabrications. The excuse making for it revolved around the notion of "lying to reveal a greater truth".
This is the same mentality some people have for coming up with hate crime hoaxes (if it isn't for attention seeking).
I personally find it to be intellectually bankrupt and counter-productive; people willing to blind themselves to a problem will use such examples as evidence that all such claims are false.
Or Mao's belief that revolutionary zeal alone will nonsense projects like backyard iron furnaces somehow work.
I read it as "Your journalistic integrity and the time of your audience means nothing to me. As long as my story got out that's all I cared about."
Or "I'm a single minded sociopath."
Almost every contentious issue has a set of facts that support one side of the argument, while also having a set of facts that support the other side.
More often than not, a biased story is one that focuses exclusively on one set of facts while completely ignoring the other set. Fact checkers may catch falsehoods that are reported as facts, but they rarely point out obvious ommissions.
I guess. I'm not convinced by the facts on the other side of LGBTQ discourse. Is it really true I could be arrested in Florida because my driver's license says I'm female? It doesn't protect anyone. It doesn't make anyone's life better.
I follow a forum of my favourite sports team and people get into very heated debates who is good and who is not. By selectively pulling out stats and incidents you can really argue for any side. Note that they are fans of the same team, so it's all pride and ego.
In many ways, a half-truth is worse than a simple lie, and there is no guarantee all parties are wrong in their own way:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Sax...
Media tends to interview the most outrageous looking imbecile they can find at any event... regardless of political affiliation. The Sinclair Broadcast Group helps local news maintain consistent messaging, and thus any mistakes intentional or not are less noticeable.
Fact-checking is only as good as the data sources people find. There are groups that ran entire fake scientific journals to sell the public outright nonsense.
Verifiable facts are difficult to validate. "AI"/LLM slop content just made it worse =3
Yeah but sometimes the facts are entirely fabricated, as is the case here.
Another excellent example of the TAL format gone wrong: the Caliphate podcast series by the New York Times. Conpelling narrative, hot topic, built on quicksand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=...
You can still find it on Spotify, with a mea culpa attached.
https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5...
No one cares about facts anymore. They care about vibes and whether what is saying matches their vibes.
That's why no one reads past the reddit title or the Google news headline.
I don't know how we get past this, but I'm teaching my kids to believe NOTHING they read online or on youtube. NOTHING. I'm teaching them to get information from first hand sources, not even "reliable" sources like newspapers because they have their own agendas too. There's a hierarchy of believability, and the higher you go, the less you put your faith into that information.
It's a sad way to grow up but when almost everything is faked for engagement, it's a reality that you can't trust anything.
> No one cares about facts anymore.
There is no need to exaggerate. But I'm not only calling out a poor choice of words...
A lot of people (not as many as we would hope, I grant) care about the truth about facts. Even in this group, however, we have a problem: by the time these people are "looking for facts" their brains have already been shaped in various ways that bias how they look for facts, as explained in articles about motivated reasoning.
I agree, but I think news was always unreliable, but the difference was that there were only a few news networks and newspapers, and they all basically said the same thing. Everyone believed the same lies, so the system worked. But thanks to the internet, we gave people the ability to create highly individualized bullshit at scale.
How do you intend on handling situations where the first hand information is too complex or too technical or in a not-understood language? Such that your kids can’t directly interact with the primary source?
I completely agree with how disappointing it is that we can’t trust anything in reality anymore
Every time I read about fact-checking in journalism, I feel like there's a huge gap that nobody really talks about.
It's very easy to present a story that is 100% factually accurate, but that implies causal links or other claims that are not. Our brains love hasty generalizations, and media outlets rely on that to present near-100% truthful facts to their viewers, such that they jump to completely opposite generalizations. We're further primed for this with thought-terminating cliches like "trust the data" and "look at the facts". Media profits enormously from the subsequent outrage.
The more folks talk about "fact checking" without acknowledging the danger of cherry-picking and Texas sharpshooters and confounding variables, like in this article, the less I trust "fact checking" as a useful mechanism for forming opinions from their reported facts. Fact-checking is definitely a requirement, but still insufficient.
This is also exacerbated by narratives like those presented by TAL that introduce enormous complexity to the task, due to the emotional context.
There’s an even more surface-level commonality between these published fabrications: they’re all narratives in service of US State Department approved talking points, it’s like one level above stenography. And mainstream media is just repeating the same pattern today with coverage of Gaza.
I believe it is very important to do fact-checking yourself. For me, this means reading original documents, court reports, etc… Certainly not checking the current NYT/WSJ/FT takes, as they themselves have to be fact-checked.
People are attracted by stories, not facts.
If the story is true, good. Facts without a story lose against stories without facts.
That’s why populism is so successful.
If facts would matter Trump would be president.
The facts were all known beforehand and are now, but many don’t care about facts.
People aren’t as rational as myths like the homo economicus try to make us believe.
Just look at ads. They sell emotions not facts.
There are remarkable parallels to the Relotius scandal that took place at the German magazine Der Spiegel a few years ago (although in a bigger and more systematic way):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius#Fabrication_o...
Humans are addicted to narrative. Deep, deep down. It’s the single best tool for making compelling propaganda.
about a week ago I had a weird experience. I had purchased concert tickets for a date night with wifey in april, which got postponed to october. like wtf long.
I brought it up in conversation as i was annoyed. Everyone at the table picks up their phone to fact check me and they brought up the hall's website and said I was wrong. I had the email sent to me about the postponement on my phone, it was real. I didnt care to prove myself right. Checking the website now it's now showing october.
Why even fact check it? Just to prove me wrong? What if your fact check went wrong?
Reminds me of a book I just read, The Lifespan of a Fact. Solid read going into fact checking versus telling a story and figuring out where the line should be. Definitely entertaining.
You have to read past 40% of the article (1167 words of fluff) to get to what happened. Thanks for the narrative but better to just say the facts. Here's what should have been the actual lede:
> Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire. The nadir of the TAL approach is its January 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” When it first aired, this show appeared to be yet another example of Glass’s artistry. A reworking of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stage production by the monologist Mike Daisey that had been selling out theaters around the country, the program investigates how Americans, in their zeal for iPhones and iPads, have ignored the inconvenient truth that these sleek implements are largely manufactured by workers toiling in brutal conditions at the massive Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China.
Tldr: a bunch of the allegations in the episode were false and got past TAL's production approach at the time, but they are more careful now.
Fact checking can have bias too
Reminiscent of the dramatic release of a Syrian prisoner reported on CNN that was determined to be fake.
“CNN is acknowledging that a gripping story it aired last week depicting a Syrian man being let free from a Damascus prison after the fall of dictator Bashar Assad’s regime was not what it seemed.”
https://apnews.com/article/syria-prisoner-clarissa-ward-fake...
I understand the importance of fact-checking, but the problem is that it loses its value when much of the readership dont care about facts.
We live in a world where many, many people are not only too stupid to know how stupid they are, but don't give a shit that they're stupid AND think they're the smart ones.
Dunning-Kruger is incredibly instructive.
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So, basically, regarding journalism: they had learned nothing and forgot nothing. Something died in me when I realized TAL and NPR were largely just bullshit factories. Glass isn't even coy about his motives being to tell/sell stories. He admits that truth is secondary to theater, and he's pretty unapologetic about dressing up performance as journalism. So unconcerned about it, in fact, that he's proudly teaching such ethics to students at prestigious journalism programs when he should be teaching at the performing arts school.