Professional Bullshitter Mike Daisey Still Refuses to Apologize

I saw Mike Daisey lying in the street the other day. Actually, he was just in the street; I'm only assuming he was lying.


After the Master Storyteller was held to account over misleading pretty much everyone over his monologue "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" last year Daisey still hasn't apologized, but Ira Glass and everyone at This American Life has.  You'd think that making a load of stuff up, presenting it as fact and then going on a current affairs program to promote yourself was bad enough, but nope, Daisey isn't going to say he's sorry for any of the half digested peanuts of "truth" that were found floating in the mile wide trail of bullshit that he left behind himself.

“I think it’s a weird thing that apology is actually like the politics of personal destruction—trying to force people to apologize as a way of dismantling them,” he says. “If I gave it too easily, I think I was really afraid it would not be enough. I was really afraid that all the work, all the emphasis on Apple, on the actual labor conditions, would evaporate.”

So Daisey still hasn't gotten around to the idea that he actually lied.  And that he made money off those lies.

He didn't tell the truth, but in the fantasy world that he lives in, he actually did kinda.  But everyone else knows that he didn't.  The thing is that if he had actually apologized, and if he had actually held his hands up and said "yeah, I did this for the money, and I made a mistake", then it probably wouldn't have been so bad.  The actual point of the interview that was made during the retraction show was that Daisey continued squirming, trying to justify lying to journalists despite the wealth of evidence that had been presented in the show by Rob Schmitz.

For the record, he lied about quite a bit of what "happened" in China:

• He lied about the name of his Chinese interpreter


• He lied about meeting workers at the Apple factory that had been poisoned by n-hexane on the production line


• He lied about the number of factories that he visited in China


• He lied about the number of factory workers that he spoke to on his "fact finding" trip to Shenzhen


• His interpreter says he lied about meeting underage workers


• His interpreter says he lied about meeting workers who had been injured on the production line

In the episode that was broadcast, Daisey said that he embellished stuff in his "passion to be heard", which doesn't really excuse the fact that when he was talking to journalists, he lied.  Daisey complained that it wasn't his fault that Ira Glass took his word as gospel, saying that the show took him out of context.  In short, he's a dramatist, so he can't be blamed when he sells snake oil and gets caught out.

While the working conditions at factories in China are probably nothing to write home about, by selling lies to the American people on a stage show about a US company doing business in China and not apologizing for selling lies, Daisey winds up making Chinese politicians look positively angelic.