Showing posts with label Fresh Air. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fresh Air. Show all posts
Daisey Chain, Foxconn, and Export Policy
I want to strongly recommend listening to the podcast (or at least reading the PDF) from the retractions in This American Life.
Ira Glass of This American Life has done a good job of trying to undo the ficticious Mike Daisey reporting about Foxconn. In this episode, they try to correct the mistakes without excusing past abuses, or defusing legitimate concerns over fair trade with the workers who make Apple and other products.
The moral, to me, is that if an accident happens at a different factory in China (not Foxconn), 1000 miles to the west, two years ago, that it's not ok to say that you eyewitnessed the same accident happened at Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen. This undermines the good factory, by making them the same as the bad factory. The fact that both factories have brown people in them does not really excuse the shortcut. The lesson is that if you are a journalist, and you give someone a soap box, you have to act swiftly to prevent a daisy-chain of bad journalism from taking route.
This is what CBS 60 Minutes allowed to happen, relying on Basel Action Network's Jim Puckett, in reporting that CRT monitors were scrapped in Guiyu, China, and not at the refurbishing factories I showed them pictures of. They set into motion a chain of daisey-claims, infecting PBS Frontline, and Terry Gross' Fresh Air program, with fake statistics about e-waste exports.
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