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.
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.
That was a bit weird for the US system though. There is the obvious element that topical cable news political reporting is nearly wall-to-wall misinformation and it is often hard to tell if it was the politicians or the news operations that were most responsible. They've already hit an equilibrium where everyone appears to be doing their best to be wilfully stupid to obscure whether they are lying or just that dumb.
For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.
Dominion Voting Systems Corporation sued Fox News for defamation and then Fox News settled for nearly $800M before the case got to trial. Why do you say the legal system singled out Dominion here?
Presumably they settled because they expected to lose the case and expected to be found liable for around a billion dollars in damages. Fair enough.
But stirring up an insane unfounded panic about electronic voting security would be one of the most productive things the US cable news have done in the last 20-40 years. It is one of the best aspects of a democratic system to be paranoid about; something goes wrong there and it probably isn't recoverable. And for US corporate news it is much more in character to be up on stage strategically ignoring how every other war turned out terribly while mumbling sweet nothings about how good the next one will turn out and how justified this new one is unlike all the others.
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.
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.
It's certainly not the only evidence of problems at NPR. For example, they managed to basically accuse Trump Jr of lying to Congress in a story that should not have survived basic fact checking: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after...
That Fox News piece actually understates how big of a screw-up this was. The key quote that supposedly showed Trump Jr claiming his dad's possible real estate deal in Russia had faded away by 2016, the one that was supposedly contradicted by Cohen's court testimony about ongoing negotiations, was in response to questioning about any possible deals other than the one Cohen was involved in - and in particular one specific potential deal with a different group of people. It's not just that it was brought up elsewhere in other answers that NPR missed. Merely looking at the immediate context of that key quote, the most basic thing we should expect of old-fashioned fact checking, should've been enough to flag the problem. The fact those other negotiations had in fact been brought up was literally the whole basis for that line of questioning.
The story was true is your takeaway? A key piece of the article is that Rob Schmitz of Marketplace listened, thought something was off, and after digging found 13 lies in the story:
>Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true.
This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.
I'm drawing a narrow but crucial distinction between telling true stories and journalism.
Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation unless you've ascertained their sincerity.
That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news" doesn't even try, but journalists do exist.
TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion, etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over the line they obliterated it.
So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.
>have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist
I continue to be completely baffled by this explanation. I'm not sure I agree with this distinction you're making, which seems retrofitted to the specifics of this particular conversation, rather than an organic and clear cut conceptual distinction I've encountered in the wild. And even if the distinction were true, I don't think it has anything to do with the reason why this particular story failed. This American Life has been perfectly up to the task over and over again of vetting the stories and not running into this problem, so I would vehemently disagree with the idea that it's something built into the nature of their programming that made this happen when we're talking about one story out of, I don't know, 700 and counting.
I'm also not sure where the idea is coming from that a TAL story must originate independently from a journalist, and that not doing so constitutes a "tell" about the reliability of the story. Most of their stories originate from what you might typically call a source or what I might say as a person, a character, a personality, any of the raw material from which all stories are sourced. And while I do believe TAL sometimes works with third-party reporters, they also use in-house producers because they themselves are perfectly capable of being that journalistic origination of the story through which we understand it to be vetted.
Also weren't you originally saying that the story was true? I'm not sure what happened to that, but I'm finding no trace of explanation for that in this new volley of distinctions about the meaning of journalism.
The distinction indeed needs to be drawn carefully, because as I understand you, you're not describing an "other side" compared to journalism - you're describing a thin intermediary layer between journalism and the kind of outlets like e.g. Top Gear, that let people treat them as a lighthearted but factual source, then occasionally do a hit job on something or someone, and when damage they did is pointed out, proclaim "but we are an entertainment program, not news, so we don't have any obligation to be factual and accurate!".
Because of such cases, when I see someone (like you here) argue "X is not a journalist, Y is not a news program", my mind automatically pattern-matches this to ", therefore it has no obligation to tell the truth, despite the fact that they let people believe they're journalists/news". Which is not what you meant here, but common enough that I doubt this is just mine knee-jerk reaction.
The UK has Private Eye magazine. Because of their habit of making the front page a picture captioned with a joke[0], I assumed that's all they were for the first 15 years of me knowing the magazine existed.
Despite them also being famous for facing a lot of legal threats (and cases) for libel[1], it wasn't until the mid 2010s that I realised they're also known for in-depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups.
I think this was the takeaway of the entire industry. Daisey gave an admission that was basically a performance, and the message of that performance was "I was dishonest, and being dishonest is terribly morally wrong, but being dishonest made the story more true, and if therefore I have to be morally wrong to deliver the real truth, I'll have to take the blame."
Typical middle-class post-mortem after getting caught.
That happened during a time when we expected the mainstream news to be literally true, even if told from a particular perspective. If Daisey's story were politically valuable to someone today, however, every outlet would simply agree not to report on it. They'd just refer back to it in articles about Foxconn as "allegations spread around right-wing twitter about the supposed bias of a journalist who reported the story."
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.
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.
It would be telling, however, to quantify the reliability of those “years of reliable journalism” by fact checking a random sample of the stories told over those years. According to the article we are discussing, TAL started using professional fact checkers only after the discovery of the Daisey incident. We’re assuming that stories aired prior to that event are reliable, but we haven’t verified that belief, have we?
So... I can speak to this because I've listened to almost the entire TAL back catalog, lol.
The show has a stronger journalistic focus now than it did 10 years ago and _way_ more than it did 20 or (almost!) 30 years ago. It's always been part of the show—people who complain that TAL "didn't used to be political" clearly don't remember how many segments they ran about the Iraq war—but for the first decade or so the show had a very strong focus on the arts; they'd have a lot of guests sharing personal essays, short fiction, etc.
The serious journalism-type stories were generally either (1) on-the-ground reporting from their own staff, like a really great episode where they toured an aircraft carrier (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/206/somewhere-in-the-arabia...), (2) stories sourced from other journalists or professional organizations who had serious reputation to lose if they were caught in the supply chain of misinformation, or (3) "this is a thing that happened to me"-type firsthand accounts and observations. And I guess the now-debunked Apple factory story falls into the third category, but the types of stories that had previously fallen into that category tended to be far smaller in scale and/or were presented as more subjective than the Apple story had been.
All of that to say that I think you raise a valid question, and I'm sure some stuff slipped through the cracks over the years, but I also think the implication of that crack-slipping was far less dire in the show's earlier days, and there were just fewer news-ish stories overall.
So that's exactly the kind of over correction in the wrong direction that I'm talking about. I don't think I agree that that's the pertinent extrapolation here. We absolutely would benefit from that spot checking. But I don't think the implication should be that 100% or something near it of the previous articles are fabricated, or under the cloud of deep suspicion until proven otherwise. The same things that led to this particular story unraveling, are vulnerabilities that could have led to other stories unraveling.
If we get a second and a third, I think you might be right to have that cloud of suspicion. That would be like a Shattered Glass scenario and we're not there yet.
I made no extrapolation. I said that we haven't measured the reliability of the earlier stories. Instead of having a reliable measurement, we're going with our much-less-reliable assumptions (prior beliefs).
The interesting thing, I think, is those prior beliefs. Your prior beliefs, it would seem, include the belief TAL's stories are generally reliable. You believe it strongly enough that you write that doubting the reliability of earlier TAL stories is an "over correction in the wrong direction."
I don't think it's an overcorrection. When we find evidence of one fabrication from a trusted source, that source ought to lose trust. If we want to know how much trust it should lose, we have to measure. When we don't measure, when we don't take seriously the responsibility to ground our beliefs, that's how we end up with things like the replication crisis in psychology.
You're extrapolating from the Daisy incident to doubt of their previous reporting. And believe that the Daisy incident merits responding by holding TAL to a newly escalated standard for verification. From this most recent comment of yours, you seem comfortable with "doubting the reliability of earlier TAL stories" as a position you view to be not an over correction. I think you're underestimating how an extreme a position that is, and kind of equivocating between ordinary skepticism and doubting the veracity of their previous stories.
You're right that I believe TAL's stories are generally reliable, that I believe doubting them is an over-correction in the wrong direction.
I also don't think I agree that it's simply a matter of checking or not checking because I believe the vast body of work that's been free from error, although exposed to the same conditions of public scrutiny that could have revealed error in just the same way as with the Daisy story, is part of the body of evidence that actively testifies in favor of TAL. And I do think if there was more of a rocky track record, or if there proves to be more of one in the future, it absolutely could merit spot checking. And as I've said twice now already, I've given the example of Stephen Glass as a case where that skepticism was warranted.
You seem to be implying that I have a categorical opposition to spot checking which couldn't be further from the truth. I just don't think it's warranted in this instance, because it's not a reasonable extrapolation from what happened with the Daisy story.
You're inferring a lot that I didn't write or even imply. I'll be clear about my beliefs:
1. I just learned from the article about the fabricated Daisey episode and that TAL started using professional fact checkers only afterward. I was surprised on both counts.
2. I saw your comment that it would be in poor character to discredit TAL's prior reporting on the basis of this one failure.
3. I responded that it would be telling to actually estimate the reliability of earlier episodes because, right now, we're just going off our personal beliefs (and these probably vary widely from person to person).
4. You and I had a back and forth, mainly talking past one another.
5. I think that if we did actually measure the reliability of prior episodes, it would be less than a lot of TAL defenders expect and greater than a lot of TAL doubters expect.
6. As for what's reasonable vs. over correction to take away from the article, that depends largely on your prior beliefs about TAL and how the world functions in general.
Note that point 5, being a product of my prior beliefs about TAL and how the world functions in general, is actually an example of point 6 in action.
You never had a reason to trust TAL's reporting before the Daisey incident. You maybe trusted it because it is on the radio, and you trust people who can afford a radio station; or because it was on an NPR station, and you trust NPR.
This is pragmatic as long as you have no evidence either way and you're not basing any serious decisions on this "trust." But the fact that they didn't bother to fact check Daisey, and in fact had never fact-checked before that: this is actually the first information you have about TAL's internal processes. It should vastly outweigh it being on the radio.
This comes off like fandom. You seem to have an interest in this incident not affecting people's perception of the quality of TAL, but I have no idea what that interest would be. It shouldn't bother you that people see the show as a place whose facts should be checked if one is considering spreading them.
Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same as saying that it is consistently fabricated. As they say, a broken clock is still correct twice a day. To choose something less extreme: an unreliable employee may still show up for work 80% of the time.
When their methodology prior to a particular point of time was shown to be weak, and the programs from that time are still available (the archives go back 30 years), I think that asking for spot checking of those old episodes is legitimate. The key thing here are the archives. If the archives weren't available it would be much easier to shrug and say, "live and learn."
There's reason to be more optimistic than this. There is, to some extent, an automatic post-hoc fact checking process built in to being such a high profile publication. For example, the Daisy narrative was challenged because someone with some personal knowledge of the subject heard the show.
It's much better and less embarrassing to get the fact checking right before publication, but the truth generally comes out one way or another. So I'm willing to give historic TAL... not certainty, but at least the benefit of the doubt.
>Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same as saying that it is consistently fabricated.
I generally understand that to be true, but that was not the upshot of the point being made by the other commenter. Their extrapolation was a much more along the lines of treating it like an open question whether the other stories were fabricated at a level of elevated suspicion that calls for spot checking.
All the other stories were vulnerable to being upended just like this one and seem to have withstood the test of time. I also think that despite this particular story falling apart, TAL has a track record of credibility and vetting that is more legitimate than is being implied by casting doubt over the history of theirs, and I did contrast it to the case of Stephen Glass, which model conditions where that degree of skepticism is more appropriately warranted.
Perhaps instead of fact checking, we could compare the previous narratives with known public knowledge of the events, to determine if the narratives provided an accurate view of reality. It is easy to distort the truth and still tell no lies.
>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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure what discourse or side you're talking about, but... no the Florida police are not arresting everyone whose driving license says they are female. Obviously.
If you're curious about this, Erin in the Morning is a fantastic resource on the resurging politicization of LGBTQ+ people. Knowing about her Substack made it trivial for me to find the issue.
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
Those who do not understand how AI works might think that it might correct all the falsehoods that come along. But if an LLM is trained on data full of errors and falsehoods, then the resulting model will only reenforce them rather than correct them.
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.
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.
TV news in the early era was concentrated. There were only three national networks. When CNN first when on the air in 1980 it signaled the beginning of this change.
During this entire time; however, print journalism was still widely distributed and you could find an absolutely huge range of off beat reporting even from fairly large publications.
The internet era was initially great for this model but once all the advertising effectively got monopolized and search giants started walling off and cherry picking content to place under their own banner it finally killed the rich set of options available in print.
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.
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
It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites actually want to be read by readers
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.
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.
NYT/WSJ/FT are more propagandistic then we are aware of. Just observe the developments in the Middle East, watch the language used, the euphemisms, compare that to their language when it comes to Russian aggression. It is very clear that our western media is manufacturing more consent then writing in an objective neutral language.
True, but confirmation bias is a bitch. Without the willingness to change one's mind when presented with compelling evidence, such fact-checking borders on harmful.
In some religious circles they literally teach confirmation bias as a virtue, by another name of course.
To paraphrase, if your prayer was answered or you were unexpectedly spared/saved/rewarded then it was god; and if not then he works in mysterious ways/you lacked faith/were unworthy/etc.
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.
You can have 100% fact based propaganda by cherry picking. This is not dissimilar to coming with a theory just based on your selected subset of preferred observations. This is the fuel of conspiracy theories.
I completely agree with you. Necessary but insufficient. One needs to approach your view of reality like the scientific process, looking to disprove your theories, not looking for facts that reinforce them.
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 think I can't really accept that framing on a number of levels, but first and foremost, because it's a very lazy and easy accusation to make. One famous criticism of George W. Bush, as he was increasingly discredited in his second term was that "some things are true, even if George Bush says them."
I personally think The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens is a must-read, and I would also say that what Uncle Sam really wants by Noam Chomsky was truly eye-opening to me in recasting the history of American foreign policy, but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was an intentional part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy. Sometimes these criticisms of labor issues, of human rights issues, of democracy issues, etc are going to speak for themselves not because they conveniently coincide with a preferred state department narrative, but because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.
So I don't think it's enough to just say that the State Department would agree with criticisms as though that's sufficient to dismiss them. I understand there are corners in the internet where that passes muster, but to me it feels like it skips too many necessary steps in critical thinking.
It’s certainly the case that there is overlap with the positions of the State Department and the truth. But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth. That’s how they’re treated, however. In fact, those who approach state narratives with skepticism are not taken seriously, and those who choose to be stenographers become the editors of the New York Times or the Atlantic, etc.
> but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was a part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy and sometimes these criticisms are going to speak for themselves simply because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.
After WWII the United States imported many Nazi functionaries to serve as the founders of institutions such as NATO[1], scientists, etc. During the war, American businessmen profited heavily from doing business with the Nazi regime. Of course we weren’t alone in this.
Ending the Holocaust (too late) was obviously moral. But very little of what was done after was in interest of global democracy or the greater good, just as our entry into the war was not really about those things either. There were many in the global Jewish community and even in FDR’s own administration who were ringing the alarm bells long before we entered the war to do something, anything to help get Jews out of Europe to safety, who were denied and obstructed. Ultimately we only entered the war when it served our own best interests.
The focus on WWII is also interesting because it is one of the only times in the last century that the U.S. could have been said to fight a just war. What about all the rest?
This feels largely like a gish gallop away from the parts of topic that would be pertinent to the article. The article in question here is about This American life and I don't think the reason it got past people's critical filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe state department narratives. I think it had a lot more to do with the credibility of this American life, the motivations of the person being interviewed as the primary source for the story, and the narrative beats that this American life was interested in representing to its audience.
>But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth.
I don't know that anyone here is making that argument, so I'm not sure it's a prudent use of time to be engaging with it, and I think engaging would take us further away from the article with increasingly diminishing returns.
> I don't think the reason it got past people's critical filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe state department narratives.
It’s valid to think that. But what actually happened was that a series of pieces that sound like the fever dreams of a State Department neocon got repackaged into a format palatable to liberals and disseminated, despite the fact that they lacked factual basis. The only substantive difference between that, and say, Fox News, is that Ira and NPR had the shame to apologize after the hoaxes were uncovered. If Ira had stuck to pieces about interesting bits of Americana that he and his team could validate independently, or brought in credible journalists well versed in the topics he was covering, he could’ve avoided this. But he didn’t. Why didn’t he feel that he needed to adequately vet his stories? Because he believed them to be true.
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.
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.
Orwell’s Reflections on the Spanish War[0] has a good quote about this which feels particularly salient in light of the tariffs:
> Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.
I once thought this, but it is dangerously incorrect. During the pandemic I observed people up-close deny reality in front of their own eyes. I sat at a dinner table and listened to a man go on about how the hospitals were just making up Covid cases for money, and it wasn't really that widespread - right after his wife related that the Covid ward at the hospital she just got back from was nearly full. Where she worked, as a doctor.
Or consider a century earlier, in world war one we poured humans into literal meat grinders with the belief that maybe today, if we just poured enough in, it would make a difference. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary for days, weeks, and months prior. One need not read much history to see that people will care about a story they have accepted long past the point their senses tell them otherwise. They will claim they are freezing while the flames lick their very feet.
It's possible that hospitals were claiming something like a car crash victim with COVID as a COVID death for extra funding, making actual total deaths less due to COVID than reported, meaning what he said was true, even while the hospital is full of people with COVID, possibly including that very car crash victim.
Other official facts of the time period included 1. standing in a restaurant without a mask on is almost terrorism and 2. sitting at a restaurant without a mask on is fine.
Atleast in places like HN. Its not uncommon to see articles being called out for indulging in "narrative" where mere reporting of facts would have sufficed
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?
Social media has bred a generation who believe that value comes from being the loudest voice in the room. One-upmanship is one of the sure ways to make your voice stand out.
Ah yes that drives me crazy too. Everything is a micro battle to win.
I had this issue with some junior colleagues. I had to point out that it's disrupting and actually quite tiring being interrupted all the time with minor corrections, often wrong or so unbelievably minor. One thought he could demand sources for everything I said no matter the stakes. They ignored context, nuance, caveats etc and just listened to the part they could attempt to easily refute. God I'm exhausted just recounting it
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.
Ironically, your comment would be illustrative of Dunning Kruger, if it really showed what you're claiming.
The Dunning Kruger study never said that stupid people believed they were smarter than smart people, or that they outperformed the high performers. All it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance, but they still believed they did worse than the high performers.
> it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance
True.
> but they still believed they did worse than the high performers.
Fair point, but if they can't understand their own unexcellent performance, how can they understand excellence? They never did.
They thought they were expert enough, which was simply not true.
And they had ZERO understanding of what it takes to be an excellent performer, which was precisely why they thought they were excellent.
I read the study itself. It shows "the overconfidence of fools".
Does DJT think he's a dipshit? Of course not. He believes the exact opposite, because he's a lying fool, just like the underperformers of DK. Whether a person knows they're lying or is just mistaken is not as important as the fact that they're just not capable nor do they even know what it takes to be capable. They are trapped in the fiction of their own capability.
The key takeaway is that honest, humble hard work is the way to achieve expertise, and that many people have chosen to lie to themself and the world instead.
I do concede that they didn't believe they were better than the true experts. Thanks for the correction, but the overconfident fools of the world still think they're smart, and often they think they ARE smarter than intelligent people, even though that's not in DK.
On top of that, quite a few fact checkers seem to be cherry pickers too. I’ve seen too many fact-checks where with some knowledge of the topic it was obvious that fact checkers either didn’t do due diligence or pushed a narrative on purpose.
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.”
Please edit swipes out of comments on Hacker News. We're trying for curious conversation here. If you could remind yourself of the guidelines that would be appreciated: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://archive.ph/gIjim
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.
That was a bit weird for the US system though. There is the obvious element that topical cable news political reporting is nearly wall-to-wall misinformation and it is often hard to tell if it was the politicians or the news operations that were most responsible. They've already hit an equilibrium where everyone appears to be doing their best to be wilfully stupid to obscure whether they are lying or just that dumb.
For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.
Dominion Voting Systems Corporation sued Fox News for defamation and then Fox News settled for nearly $800M before the case got to trial. Why do you say the legal system singled out Dominion here?
Presumably they settled because they expected to lose the case and expected to be found liable for around a billion dollars in damages. Fair enough.
But stirring up an insane unfounded panic about electronic voting security would be one of the most productive things the US cable news have done in the last 20-40 years. It is one of the best aspects of a democratic system to be paranoid about; something goes wrong there and it probably isn't recoverable. And for US corporate news it is much more in character to be up on stage strategically ignoring how every other war turned out terribly while mumbling sweet nothings about how good the next one will turn out and how justified this new one is unlike all the others.
> and I don’t think regular viewers knew not to trust it as journalism.
Why?
And here's the same thing for rachel maddow
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defen...
I found that case, here’s the actual court decision:
https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Herri...
It’s worthwhile to track down the court proceedings, you will learn things not covered in various spin articles.
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?
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.
It's certainly not the only evidence of problems at NPR. For example, they managed to basically accuse Trump Jr of lying to Congress in a story that should not have survived basic fact checking: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after...
That Fox News piece actually understates how big of a screw-up this was. The key quote that supposedly showed Trump Jr claiming his dad's possible real estate deal in Russia had faded away by 2016, the one that was supposedly contradicted by Cohen's court testimony about ongoing negotiations, was in response to questioning about any possible deals other than the one Cohen was involved in - and in particular one specific potential deal with a different group of people. It's not just that it was brought up elsewhere in other answers that NPR missed. Merely looking at the immediate context of that key quote, the most basic thing we should expect of old-fashioned fact checking, should've been enough to flag the problem. The fact those other negotiations had in fact been brought up was literally the whole basis for that line of questioning.
The story was true is your takeaway? A key piece of the article is that Rob Schmitz of Marketplace listened, thought something was off, and after digging found 13 lies in the story:
>Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true.
This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.
I'm drawing a narrow but crucial distinction between telling true stories and journalism.
Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation unless you've ascertained their sincerity.
That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news" doesn't even try, but journalists do exist.
TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion, etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over the line they obliterated it.
So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.
>have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist
I continue to be completely baffled by this explanation. I'm not sure I agree with this distinction you're making, which seems retrofitted to the specifics of this particular conversation, rather than an organic and clear cut conceptual distinction I've encountered in the wild. And even if the distinction were true, I don't think it has anything to do with the reason why this particular story failed. This American Life has been perfectly up to the task over and over again of vetting the stories and not running into this problem, so I would vehemently disagree with the idea that it's something built into the nature of their programming that made this happen when we're talking about one story out of, I don't know, 700 and counting.
I'm also not sure where the idea is coming from that a TAL story must originate independently from a journalist, and that not doing so constitutes a "tell" about the reliability of the story. Most of their stories originate from what you might typically call a source or what I might say as a person, a character, a personality, any of the raw material from which all stories are sourced. And while I do believe TAL sometimes works with third-party reporters, they also use in-house producers because they themselves are perfectly capable of being that journalistic origination of the story through which we understand it to be vetted.
Also weren't you originally saying that the story was true? I'm not sure what happened to that, but I'm finding no trace of explanation for that in this new volley of distinctions about the meaning of journalism.
The distinction indeed needs to be drawn carefully, because as I understand you, you're not describing an "other side" compared to journalism - you're describing a thin intermediary layer between journalism and the kind of outlets like e.g. Top Gear, that let people treat them as a lighthearted but factual source, then occasionally do a hit job on something or someone, and when damage they did is pointed out, proclaim "but we are an entertainment program, not news, so we don't have any obligation to be factual and accurate!".
Because of such cases, when I see someone (like you here) argue "X is not a journalist, Y is not a news program", my mind automatically pattern-matches this to ", therefore it has no obligation to tell the truth, despite the fact that they let people believe they're journalists/news". Which is not what you meant here, but common enough that I doubt this is just mine knee-jerk reaction.
I've experienced making this mistake myself.
The UK has Private Eye magazine. Because of their habit of making the front page a picture captioned with a joke[0], I assumed that's all they were for the first 15 years of me knowing the magazine existed.
Despite them also being famous for facing a lot of legal threats (and cases) for libel[1], it wasn't until the mid 2010s that I realised they're also known for in-depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=private+eye+front+page&t=osx&iar=i...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-15279371
What are you talking about? It was a complete fabrication. There is no true story.
> The story was true is your takeaway?
I think this was the takeaway of the entire industry. Daisey gave an admission that was basically a performance, and the message of that performance was "I was dishonest, and being dishonest is terribly morally wrong, but being dishonest made the story more true, and if therefore I have to be morally wrong to deliver the real truth, I'll have to take the blame."
Typical middle-class post-mortem after getting caught.
That happened during a time when we expected the mainstream news to be literally true, even if told from a particular perspective. If Daisey's story were politically valuable to someone today, however, every outlet would simply agree not to report on it. They'd just refer back to it in articles about Foxconn as "allegations spread around right-wing twitter about the supposed bias of a journalist who reported the story."
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.
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.
It would be telling, however, to quantify the reliability of those “years of reliable journalism” by fact checking a random sample of the stories told over those years. According to the article we are discussing, TAL started using professional fact checkers only after the discovery of the Daisey incident. We’re assuming that stories aired prior to that event are reliable, but we haven’t verified that belief, have we?
So... I can speak to this because I've listened to almost the entire TAL back catalog, lol.
The show has a stronger journalistic focus now than it did 10 years ago and _way_ more than it did 20 or (almost!) 30 years ago. It's always been part of the show—people who complain that TAL "didn't used to be political" clearly don't remember how many segments they ran about the Iraq war—but for the first decade or so the show had a very strong focus on the arts; they'd have a lot of guests sharing personal essays, short fiction, etc.
The serious journalism-type stories were generally either (1) on-the-ground reporting from their own staff, like a really great episode where they toured an aircraft carrier (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/206/somewhere-in-the-arabia...), (2) stories sourced from other journalists or professional organizations who had serious reputation to lose if they were caught in the supply chain of misinformation, or (3) "this is a thing that happened to me"-type firsthand accounts and observations. And I guess the now-debunked Apple factory story falls into the third category, but the types of stories that had previously fallen into that category tended to be far smaller in scale and/or were presented as more subjective than the Apple story had been.
All of that to say that I think you raise a valid question, and I'm sure some stuff slipped through the cracks over the years, but I also think the implication of that crack-slipping was far less dire in the show's earlier days, and there were just fewer news-ish stories overall.
So that's exactly the kind of over correction in the wrong direction that I'm talking about. I don't think I agree that that's the pertinent extrapolation here. We absolutely would benefit from that spot checking. But I don't think the implication should be that 100% or something near it of the previous articles are fabricated, or under the cloud of deep suspicion until proven otherwise. The same things that led to this particular story unraveling, are vulnerabilities that could have led to other stories unraveling.
If we get a second and a third, I think you might be right to have that cloud of suspicion. That would be like a Shattered Glass scenario and we're not there yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Glass_(film)
I made no extrapolation. I said that we haven't measured the reliability of the earlier stories. Instead of having a reliable measurement, we're going with our much-less-reliable assumptions (prior beliefs).
The interesting thing, I think, is those prior beliefs. Your prior beliefs, it would seem, include the belief TAL's stories are generally reliable. You believe it strongly enough that you write that doubting the reliability of earlier TAL stories is an "over correction in the wrong direction."
I don't think it's an overcorrection. When we find evidence of one fabrication from a trusted source, that source ought to lose trust. If we want to know how much trust it should lose, we have to measure. When we don't measure, when we don't take seriously the responsibility to ground our beliefs, that's how we end up with things like the replication crisis in psychology.
You're extrapolating from the Daisy incident to doubt of their previous reporting. And believe that the Daisy incident merits responding by holding TAL to a newly escalated standard for verification. From this most recent comment of yours, you seem comfortable with "doubting the reliability of earlier TAL stories" as a position you view to be not an over correction. I think you're underestimating how an extreme a position that is, and kind of equivocating between ordinary skepticism and doubting the veracity of their previous stories.
You're right that I believe TAL's stories are generally reliable, that I believe doubting them is an over-correction in the wrong direction.
I also don't think I agree that it's simply a matter of checking or not checking because I believe the vast body of work that's been free from error, although exposed to the same conditions of public scrutiny that could have revealed error in just the same way as with the Daisy story, is part of the body of evidence that actively testifies in favor of TAL. And I do think if there was more of a rocky track record, or if there proves to be more of one in the future, it absolutely could merit spot checking. And as I've said twice now already, I've given the example of Stephen Glass as a case where that skepticism was warranted.
You seem to be implying that I have a categorical opposition to spot checking which couldn't be further from the truth. I just don't think it's warranted in this instance, because it's not a reasonable extrapolation from what happened with the Daisy story.
You're inferring a lot that I didn't write or even imply. I'll be clear about my beliefs:
1. I just learned from the article about the fabricated Daisey episode and that TAL started using professional fact checkers only afterward. I was surprised on both counts.
2. I saw your comment that it would be in poor character to discredit TAL's prior reporting on the basis of this one failure.
3. I responded that it would be telling to actually estimate the reliability of earlier episodes because, right now, we're just going off our personal beliefs (and these probably vary widely from person to person).
4. You and I had a back and forth, mainly talking past one another.
5. I think that if we did actually measure the reliability of prior episodes, it would be less than a lot of TAL defenders expect and greater than a lot of TAL doubters expect.
6. As for what's reasonable vs. over correction to take away from the article, that depends largely on your prior beliefs about TAL and how the world functions in general.
Note that point 5, being a product of my prior beliefs about TAL and how the world functions in general, is actually an example of point 6 in action.
You never had a reason to trust TAL's reporting before the Daisey incident. You maybe trusted it because it is on the radio, and you trust people who can afford a radio station; or because it was on an NPR station, and you trust NPR.
This is pragmatic as long as you have no evidence either way and you're not basing any serious decisions on this "trust." But the fact that they didn't bother to fact check Daisey, and in fact had never fact-checked before that: this is actually the first information you have about TAL's internal processes. It should vastly outweigh it being on the radio.
This comes off like fandom. You seem to have an interest in this incident not affecting people's perception of the quality of TAL, but I have no idea what that interest would be. It shouldn't bother you that people see the show as a place whose facts should be checked if one is considering spreading them.
Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same as saying that it is consistently fabricated. As they say, a broken clock is still correct twice a day. To choose something less extreme: an unreliable employee may still show up for work 80% of the time.
When their methodology prior to a particular point of time was shown to be weak, and the programs from that time are still available (the archives go back 30 years), I think that asking for spot checking of those old episodes is legitimate. The key thing here are the archives. If the archives weren't available it would be much easier to shrug and say, "live and learn."
There's reason to be more optimistic than this. There is, to some extent, an automatic post-hoc fact checking process built in to being such a high profile publication. For example, the Daisy narrative was challenged because someone with some personal knowledge of the subject heard the show.
It's much better and less embarrassing to get the fact checking right before publication, but the truth generally comes out one way or another. So I'm willing to give historic TAL... not certainty, but at least the benefit of the doubt.
>Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same as saying that it is consistently fabricated.
I generally understand that to be true, but that was not the upshot of the point being made by the other commenter. Their extrapolation was a much more along the lines of treating it like an open question whether the other stories were fabricated at a level of elevated suspicion that calls for spot checking.
All the other stories were vulnerable to being upended just like this one and seem to have withstood the test of time. I also think that despite this particular story falling apart, TAL has a track record of credibility and vetting that is more legitimate than is being implied by casting doubt over the history of theirs, and I did contrast it to the case of Stephen Glass, which model conditions where that degree of skepticism is more appropriately warranted.
Perhaps instead of fact checking, we could compare the previous narratives with known public knowledge of the events, to determine if the narratives provided an accurate view of reality. It is easy to distort the truth and still tell no lies.
>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)
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.
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.
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...
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
That could be given a pass if the stories were not complete lies and that the attention brought wasn't deeply damaging to the community it addressed.
It's a pity that it worked. A nation of immigrants is now virulently anti-immigrant.
Sadly, it’s nothing new. We’ve always welcomed some immigrants and hated others. The specific groups have just changed throughout the years.
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.
Not sure what discourse or side you're talking about, but... no the Florida police are not arresting everyone whose driving license says they are female. Obviously.
If you're curious about this, Erin in the Morning is a fantastic resource on the resurging politicization of LGBTQ+ people. Knowing about her Substack made it trivial for me to find the issue.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/florida-misrepresenting-g...
Yeah but sometimes the facts are entirely fabricated, as is the case here.
Except the right have been shown, time and again, to outright lie.
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
Those who do not understand how AI works might think that it might correct all the falsehoods that come along. But if an LLM is trained on data full of errors and falsehoods, then the resulting model will only reenforce them rather than correct them.
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.
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.
TV news in the early era was concentrated. There were only three national networks. When CNN first when on the air in 1980 it signaled the beginning of this change.
During this entire time; however, print journalism was still widely distributed and you could find an absolutely huge range of off beat reporting even from fairly large publications.
The internet era was initially great for this model but once all the advertising effectively got monopolized and search giants started walling off and cherry picking content to place under their own banner it finally killed the rich set of options available in print.
> 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.
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
It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites actually want to be read by readers
Professor Legasov would be disappointed
You seem to care about the truth and I do. That makes two…
I’m optimistic that we can find new ways to ground our media in truthfulness over the next few decades. Some people care about that a lot.
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.
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.
NYT/WSJ/FT are more propagandistic then we are aware of. Just observe the developments in the Middle East, watch the language used, the euphemisms, compare that to their language when it comes to Russian aggression. It is very clear that our western media is manufacturing more consent then writing in an objective neutral language.
True, but confirmation bias is a bitch. Without the willingness to change one's mind when presented with compelling evidence, such fact-checking borders on harmful.
In some religious circles they literally teach confirmation bias as a virtue, by another name of course.
To paraphrase, if your prayer was answered or you were unexpectedly spared/saved/rewarded then it was god; and if not then he works in mysterious ways/you lacked faith/were unworthy/etc.
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.
You can have 100% fact based propaganda by cherry picking. This is not dissimilar to coming with a theory just based on your selected subset of preferred observations. This is the fuel of conspiracy theories.
I completely agree with you. Necessary but insufficient. One needs to approach your view of reality like the scientific process, looking to disprove your theories, not looking for facts that reinforce them.
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 think I can't really accept that framing on a number of levels, but first and foremost, because it's a very lazy and easy accusation to make. One famous criticism of George W. Bush, as he was increasingly discredited in his second term was that "some things are true, even if George Bush says them."
I personally think The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens is a must-read, and I would also say that what Uncle Sam really wants by Noam Chomsky was truly eye-opening to me in recasting the history of American foreign policy, but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was an intentional part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy. Sometimes these criticisms of labor issues, of human rights issues, of democracy issues, etc are going to speak for themselves not because they conveniently coincide with a preferred state department narrative, but because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.
So I don't think it's enough to just say that the State Department would agree with criticisms as though that's sufficient to dismiss them. I understand there are corners in the internet where that passes muster, but to me it feels like it skips too many necessary steps in critical thinking.
It’s certainly the case that there is overlap with the positions of the State Department and the truth. But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth. That’s how they’re treated, however. In fact, those who approach state narratives with skepticism are not taken seriously, and those who choose to be stenographers become the editors of the New York Times or the Atlantic, etc.
> but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was a part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy and sometimes these criticisms are going to speak for themselves simply because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.
After WWII the United States imported many Nazi functionaries to serve as the founders of institutions such as NATO[1], scientists, etc. During the war, American businessmen profited heavily from doing business with the Nazi regime. Of course we weren’t alone in this.
Ending the Holocaust (too late) was obviously moral. But very little of what was done after was in interest of global democracy or the greater good, just as our entry into the war was not really about those things either. There were many in the global Jewish community and even in FDR’s own administration who were ringing the alarm bells long before we entered the war to do something, anything to help get Jews out of Europe to safety, who were denied and obstructed. Ultimately we only entered the war when it served our own best interests.
The focus on WWII is also interesting because it is one of the only times in the last century that the U.S. could have been said to fight a just war. What about all the rest?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger
This feels largely like a gish gallop away from the parts of topic that would be pertinent to the article. The article in question here is about This American life and I don't think the reason it got past people's critical filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe state department narratives. I think it had a lot more to do with the credibility of this American life, the motivations of the person being interviewed as the primary source for the story, and the narrative beats that this American life was interested in representing to its audience.
>But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth.
I don't know that anyone here is making that argument, so I'm not sure it's a prudent use of time to be engaging with it, and I think engaging would take us further away from the article with increasingly diminishing returns.
> I don't think the reason it got past people's critical filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe state department narratives.
It’s valid to think that. But what actually happened was that a series of pieces that sound like the fever dreams of a State Department neocon got repackaged into a format palatable to liberals and disseminated, despite the fact that they lacked factual basis. The only substantive difference between that, and say, Fox News, is that Ira and NPR had the shame to apologize after the hoaxes were uncovered. If Ira had stuck to pieces about interesting bits of Americana that he and his team could validate independently, or brought in credible journalists well versed in the topics he was covering, he could’ve avoided this. But he didn’t. Why didn’t he feel that he needed to adequately vet his stories? Because he believed them to be true.
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.
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.
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.
This is only true to a point. When facts impact their lives people suddenly care more about them than stories.
Orwell’s Reflections on the Spanish War[0] has a good quote about this which feels particularly salient in light of the tariffs:
> Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.
[0]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I once thought this, but it is dangerously incorrect. During the pandemic I observed people up-close deny reality in front of their own eyes. I sat at a dinner table and listened to a man go on about how the hospitals were just making up Covid cases for money, and it wasn't really that widespread - right after his wife related that the Covid ward at the hospital she just got back from was nearly full. Where she worked, as a doctor.
Or consider a century earlier, in world war one we poured humans into literal meat grinders with the belief that maybe today, if we just poured enough in, it would make a difference. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary for days, weeks, and months prior. One need not read much history to see that people will care about a story they have accepted long past the point their senses tell them otherwise. They will claim they are freezing while the flames lick their very feet.
It's possible that hospitals were claiming something like a car crash victim with COVID as a COVID death for extra funding, making actual total deaths less due to COVID than reported, meaning what he said was true, even while the hospital is full of people with COVID, possibly including that very car crash victim.
Other official facts of the time period included 1. standing in a restaurant without a mask on is almost terrorism and 2. sitting at a restaurant without a mask on is fine.
But sometimes the impact has to be pretty bad and by pretty I mean ugly
Fact checking can have bias too
Humans are addicted to narrative. Deep, deep down. It’s the single best tool for making compelling propaganda.
Certainly more and more people are now suspecting of something odd, when they see a narrative, especially when the bare facts are scarce or obscured.
I don’t think this is true at all.
Look at the rise of Qanon, for example, or antivax, or any other popular narrative-based fiction that is gaining traction.
The news still uncritically reports what the police claim happened.
The power of narrative is becoming greater in our connected world, not less. It has less requirement now to be rooted in any sort of facts.
Atleast in places like HN. Its not uncommon to see articles being called out for indulging in "narrative" where mere reporting of facts would have sufficed
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?
This is so common in my experience, especially when they're 30 or younger, and I'd love to know what it is.
Is it just an excuse to pickup their phone due to addiction?
https://xkcd.com/386/
Social media has bred a generation who believe that value comes from being the loudest voice in the room. One-upmanship is one of the sure ways to make your voice stand out.
Ah yes that drives me crazy too. Everything is a micro battle to win.
I had this issue with some junior colleagues. I had to point out that it's disrupting and actually quite tiring being interrupted all the time with minor corrections, often wrong or so unbelievably minor. One thought he could demand sources for everything I said no matter the stakes. They ignored context, nuance, caveats etc and just listened to the part they could attempt to easily refute. God I'm exhausted just recounting it
Am I an old fart ..
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.
Ironically, your comment would be illustrative of Dunning Kruger, if it really showed what you're claiming.
The Dunning Kruger study never said that stupid people believed they were smarter than smart people, or that they outperformed the high performers. All it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance, but they still believed they did worse than the high performers.
You don't have to believe me. It's clearly shown on the Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...
> it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance
True.
> but they still believed they did worse than the high performers.
Fair point, but if they can't understand their own unexcellent performance, how can they understand excellence? They never did.
They thought they were expert enough, which was simply not true.
And they had ZERO understanding of what it takes to be an excellent performer, which was precisely why they thought they were excellent.
I read the study itself. It shows "the overconfidence of fools".
Does DJT think he's a dipshit? Of course not. He believes the exact opposite, because he's a lying fool, just like the underperformers of DK. Whether a person knows they're lying or is just mistaken is not as important as the fact that they're just not capable nor do they even know what it takes to be capable. They are trapped in the fiction of their own capability.
The key takeaway is that honest, humble hard work is the way to achieve expertise, and that many people have chosen to lie to themself and the world instead.
I do concede that they didn't believe they were better than the true experts. Thanks for the correction, but the overconfident fools of the world still think they're smart, and often they think they ARE smarter than intelligent people, even though that's not in DK.
On top of that, quite a few fact checkers seem to be cherry pickers too. I’ve seen too many fact-checks where with some knowledge of the topic it was obvious that fact checkers either didn’t do due diligence or pushed a narrative on purpose.
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...
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