I am an American, currently living in Poland. I was stationed in Europe for over a decade with the US Air Force. Both during my time in the service and afterward as a civilian, I have been to pre-Solidarity Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Central America. I am familiar with conditions in third-world, Communist and other dictatorial nations.
Is it all surprising that when state security agencies of a repressive regime discover the name of a participant of "anti-government activities" (sometimes referred to as "counter-revolutionary" or "subversive"), that that individual, in turn, "recants"?
Is it all surprising that oppressive regimes can wash-up and parade a slew of "witnesses" to deny such accounts for western corporate communications representatives and the round-eyed press?
Do we now disregard, out of hand, other confirmed reports by other established news sources? (i.e. The New York Times, Business Insider, etc.)
BP stumbled in their PR endeavors, but still managed to out-last national outrage; are we to believe the Apple, Foxconn and the Chinese regime is any less adept?
Deniability through foreign sub-contracting was a lesson taught long before the likes of Union Carbide (remember Bhopal?); and that lesson was better learned more by one side than the other (and is much cheaper than burying culpability in decades-long litigation).

I am only surprised that the denials took this long.

I mentioned this subject to my Polish wife and other Polish friends of mine without extensive explanation; the reaction was the same: "Duh!... in Communist times, it was the same here…"
I have personally witnessed conditions that far „out-do" Mr. Daisey's reports; and was not the least bit surprised by his accounts. (Have you ever seen how car batteries are "recycled" in Central America?)

Submit, America, to your Orwellian Masters; there are Chinese oligarchs, with sinister grins, and Apple executives, popping corks, as they celebrate your gullibility.

I have seen it (or, rather, variants of the same thing); I have seen it, smelled it, tasted it (you haven't lived until you've tasted tamales steamed over battery acid). I have felt the heartbreak... and the shame of my inability to change these things in sufficient measure; or, as a minimum, to inspire the necessary outrage in sufficient numbers. I am too much of a coward, too selfish, too lazy too limited to change enough of this world; but at least I don't make excuses or pretend.

There are people(s) all over this planet that want to be like you; while sacrificing life, limb and pisoning thier children with your consumption and waste.

So, go ahead navel-pondering America; stick your head back in the sand;
Just remember what part of you is still exposed.

Maybe there's (potentially) an interesting parallel between the Mike Daisey story and the Robert Bales story -- NB, the story not the individuals. In both cases we have a person now being widely vilified for things they did wrong, and in both cases the media's focus on the individuals is being, and will continue to be, used to distract the public from the real issues involved. I'd like to see Up deal with the real issues.

For the soldier-murderer story, the real issues are the history of U.S. indiscriminate killing in Afghanistan, and how the Pentagon spins this as a series of "unfortunate accidents." But, to take only a single tiny piece of evidence, I just started reading Michael Hastings The Operators, and at one point the author reports that one of the first things Gen. McChrystal did on arriving in Afghanistan was to issue orders to radically alter the "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to military strategy (the general's goal being to implement COIN strategy). U.S. media will not report the casual disregard for human life so often taken by our military forces. Instead they focus on a lone gunman, apparently crazy, who commits mass murder.

With Mike Daisey, the media can now happily indulge a feeding frenzy over the sins of this rather confused but earnest monologist. And like Ira Glass, we can continue agonizing, if we have a conscience, over whether or not we should have bad feelings about buying iPads. But the real issues concern, not just working conditions in factories, but the overall economic/political system in which an oppressive regime in China works hand-in-hand with America's economic and political elite to go on treating workers like slaves they happen not to formally "own." What we really need to be asking is whether it can ever be a just system when the workers do NOT own the factories they work in, and do NOT see much profit from what they put into their work. As it is now, the most American consumers are being expected to do is to ask the same questions about Chinese workers that they might ask about the treatment of Chinese pets: we want them all to be treated "humanely" ... but not as humans deserve to be treated.

While I respect Mr. Hayes' desire to deal with this personally on his return next week, it damages the credibility of the show to not have even acknowledged it today. You gave Mr. Daisey a lot of air time, and not just in last week's show, and thus have a responsibility to deal with these developments. To not even mention them immediately is not the kind of journalism I think Up With Chris viewers expect.

Please tell me the FOXnews bimbo is not going to be a fixture! At the very least, sit her at a card table with a rattle next time. A speech writer for Condi Rice? C'mon man, lets stick with the triple IQ rule.

geez...

I'm very anxious to hear Chris's response to the very disturbing turn of events with Daisey. I thought the _American Life— segment devoted to the problem was excruciating--especially in Daisey's inability to own up to what he had been caught at. He of course is not the first fraud to have captured media attention and to have fooled intelligent, fair-minded people (like Chris Hayes). But all the dead air when Daisey could not respond to Ira Glass when confronted with the truth made me wonder why he didn't refuse to appear on the show and stand by his terse original statement that he regretted having put his work on _This American Life- in the first place. Both Ira Glass and Chris Hayes gave Daisey exposure, credibility, acknowledgement, respect, and a forum for his lies and while his lies do not then make Apple guilt free in the things he accused them of, ultimately, they negate and cancel out whatever good his theatrical work may have hoped to accomplish.

Many audience members and journalists over the past few days have claimed that they were falsely led to perceive monologuist and playwright Mike Daisey's accounts of Apple's manufacturing practices as fact. As a member of the minority in this discussion, here's my two cents:

It is not the responsibility of an actor or playwright to be factually accurate. Journalistic standards do not and should not apply to theater; almost no play would be left standing.

Are plays now to be fact-checked and playwrights treated as journalists? Shall we exhume Shakespeare's corpse, reanimate him and hold him accountable for how he misrepresented real-life figures? Facts: Julius Caesar wasn't half-deaf, Macbeth never conversed with witches and Richard III wasn't a hunchback.

Mr. Daisey is using the tools of theater inside and outside of the performance venue, telling the essential truth about these events, not the factual truth. Nor is it his obligation to deal in facts outside of a court-room. Had "This American Life" and its host, Ira Glass, bothered to perform a proper fact-check, they’d never have had to ask him to comply with journalistic standards, for which he is completely unqualified. It is ludicrous to hold a non-journalist accountable for facts that were never checked by the journalistic venues in which he and his writings have appeared.

Stephen Glass at The New Republic, was, as a journalist, cited as a source in his articles when no others were available. It was correct to hold him to account for his disregard and perversion of journalistic standards because that was his industry. Mr. Daisey is a playwright. Any appearance Mr. Daisey makes, anything he writes about the show, is merely publicity to get bums in seats and to further provoke readers/viewers to research how Apple created its products. A goal which he has certainly achieved. That can of worms is open.

This debacle has made it very clear that a great many people have utterly no idea what purpose the theater serves and what it is that we actually do. No wonder that funding for the arts in the United States is so appalling and the majority of our national theatrical output is swill.

The factual revelations in the last few months about Apple's abhorrent manufacturing practices have made people incredibly uncomfortable. We do not want to believe that we have contributed directly or indirectly to other's oppression in the creation of our gadgets. This backlash against Mr. Daisey has less to do with debating the obligations of storytellers and more to do with our desperate search for a way to force Apple's worms back into the can and pretend they never existed.

Complain all you like about whether or not each of his details are fact, but it's merely a way for you to avoid the essential truth about Apple.

There's blood on our hands. For example, I typed this on my iMac.

-Seth Duerr

Artistic Director, The York Shakespeare Company