Mike Daisey—the performer and monologuist whose Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs put tremendous pressure on Apple to clean up its manufacturing act in China only to be revealed as a sham when This American Life retracted its segment based on it—is not leaving the stage just yet. Yesterday he took to his blog to take another stab at apologizing and explaining himself. In the post he says he "failed to honor the contract I’d established with my audiences over many years and many shows."
"This is not the place for me to try and explain my good intentions. We all know where the road paved with good intentions leads," Daisey writes. "In fact, I think it might lead to where I’m sitting right now."
I would like to apologize to my colleagues in the theater, especially those who work in non-fiction and documentary fields. What you do is essential to our civic discourse. If I have made your path more difficult, or the truth of your work harder for audiences to discern, I am sorry.
I would also like to apologize to the journalists I gave interviews to in which I exaggerated my own experiences. In my drive to tell this story and have it be heard, I lost my grounding. Things came out of my mouth that just weren’t true, and over time, I couldn’t even hear the difference myself.
To human rights advocates and those who have been doing the hard work of bringing attention to these kinds of labor issues for years, if my failures have made your jobs harder, I apologize. If I had done my job properly, with the skills I have honed for years, I could have avoided this. Instead, I blinded myself, and lost sight of the people I wanted most to help.
Daisey, who has been under tremendous pressure since details of how he bent the truth for his piece have zipped around the web, continues to stand by the core of what he was trying to say in the piece while acknowledging he done wrong. "When I said onstage that I had personally experienced things I in fact did not, I failed to honor the contract I’d established with my audiences over many years and many shows. In doing so, I not only violated their trust, I also made worse art."
Going forward he promises to "be humble before the work." Meanwhile, Chinese industry king Foxconn must be loving this development. No matter what the circumstances actually are in their factories, they've pretty much got a free ride with the media now for the next few news cycles.
