Fact checking is a real process, but what “This America Life” did wasn’t fact checking. The press release about the retraction show referenced the “fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey’s story” and the original show included this from Glass: This Full Story »
Posted by Fabrice Florin
Excellent analysis on how 'This American Life' failed to fact-check Mike Daisy's fictional account of working conditions in Chinese factories. This blog post by Craig Silverman provides a good overview of this incident on Poynter's Regret The Error feature, focusing on what went wrong in this verification process, and how it related to core ethics in journalism.
There is an opposite force here also, as Apple and Foxcom have hired PR to spin the retraction to maximum advantage. However, as SumOfUs quoted: The most important thing to know is that Daisey is just one of literally dozens of sources who’ve investigated and reported on serious violations of workers’ rights at Apple suppliers. And as This American Life producer Ira Glass said on this weekend’s show: [I]n factchecking, our main concern was whether the things Mike says about ... More »
a fair analysis based primarily (altho including the opinion of the writer) on quotes from those being analyzed. the story illustrates the difficulties of objective reporting and also the limiting factors (how to think around the obvious barriers) of fact-checking.
for me, this illustrates the biases anyone brings to their tasks. both american life and mr. daisey had built-in biases, which created the result here. mr. daisey's were acknowledged by the end of the article, altho i would guess that acknowledgement will simply be incorporated into the bias to continue in any undertaking. the american life bias is part of any news media: to get the 'real' story, believing yourself to be capable of objectivity
Retrieving Comments
