This American Life's retraction and the question that actually matters

I’m not a fan of This American Life. This will come as a shock to anyone (or any robot) crawling through this site gathering demographic information, because I fit the listener profile to a T: well-educated in the humanities, a writer, a liberal, a youngish white woman who listens to NPR almost constantly the rest of the time.

But the show just doesn’t do it for me. It’s a combination of things, I think. They tell a very structurally-specific type of story, one which, as they say on their website, centers around characters, conflict, and a universal takeaway. Clearly, I do love stories with characters and conflicts, but I find the ever-present universal takeaway on this show a bit too easy, something that allows listeners to feel as though they’re participating in the world simply by joining in the larger feelings-session. (More on this, specifically, later.) Also, I just don’t like Ira Glass’s delivery.

So when I realized last weekend that I was likely to be driving a uhaul truck over the Sunol grade from noon to one pm, smack in the middle of the This American Life broadcast on KQED, I was all set to bring my ipod and listen to another podcast. That is, I was going to listen to something else until I remembered that this weekend was Retraction Weekend, a one-hour show about a January episode entitled “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.” As I’m sure you’ve heard, Mr. Daisey was less than truthful about what he found in Shenzhen, and This American Life was retracting his piece and spending an hour talking about how and why this had happened. So I tuned in.

This piece encapsulates my impression of the general fact-checking failure; to put it briefly, Daisey told Glass that his translator, Cathy, could no longer be reached. That was that, until holes started showing after the original piece aired back in January. When Glass and his team started looking into things, Daisey said that, actually, her name was Anna, not Cathy, and he didn’t think she’d like to be contacted as she hadn’t known she was in a story at all.

The real truth? Her name actually is Cathy, and when the Marketplace China correspondent did a quick Google search, her name and phone number came up immediately.

But what bothers me the most, and what had me talking back to the radio, was a question Ira Glass asked in the third act of the show. You don’t even have to listen to Glass talk to Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter who wrote an investigative series about this same subject, in order to get to it. The summary of this section on the website will do just fine:

“And while Duhigg won't tell you how to feel about Apple and its supplier factories' practices, he does lay out the options for how you could feel, in a very clear and logical way.” 

I am certainly not innocent—I participate in an economy that takes advantage of the fact that many Chinese (and Vietnamese, and Indonesian, and Bangladeshi…) people are willing to work in conditions that we would consider inhumane, or at least, to use Duhigg’s word, harsh. And Duhigg says what often isn’t said: part of what complicates this situation is that people actually want these factory jobs, given what other options (don’t) exist. (Whether western countries have any responsibility when it comes to that state of affairs is another, relevant, question entirely.) 

But honestly, the question isn’t whether I feel a certain way about what I do. The question is what I actually do, whether that’s ignoring these harsh conditions or petitioning American companies to provide higher living standards in exchange for my business. On a larger scale, it’s not even about what I do in particular, as one woman out of millions; it’s about what we do, and the way in which we can influence other groups of people to create actual substantial change beyond our immediate, visible, communities.

So when Ira Glass boils it all down to how we feel, it seems to me that he’s missing the point. It also seems like the point might as well be an elephant sitting on the microphone, for how apparent it seems. But that’s where the interview in act three wraps up. You can find it in the transcript, on page 24 of 25:

Ira Glass: But to get to the normative question that's kind of underlying all the reporting and all the discussion of this, the thing that we all want to know when we hear this is like, "Wait, should I feel bad about this?" As somebody who owns these products, should I feel bad?

Ira, feel however you want. But please, don’t fool yourself. How you feel about this complex international economic situation means absolutely nothing when compared to your actions. It seems so obvious I can’t believe I’m writing this, but your feelings certainly don’t help anyone working in any factory anywhere in the world, especially not when you privilege them above everything else in this discussion. And please, learn to ask the obvious next question, the question that is, at any rate, what I’d really like to know:

So what can we do about this now?