‘This American Life’ Retracts Episode on Apple’s Suppliers in China

Mike Daisey, during his one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," which became the basis of an episode of "This American Life."Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMike Daisey, during his one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which became the basis of an episode of “This American Life.”

5:23 p.m. | Updated The weekly public radio program “This American Life” said on Friday that it was retracting a critical report about Apple’s suppliers in China because the storyteller, Mike Daisey, had embellished details in the narrative.

The program’s host, Ira Glass, said in a statement that Mr. Daisey “lied” to him and to Brian Reed, a producer of the program, about details related to injured workers Mr. Daisey had described meeting at Foxconn, a factory in China where Apple products are made.

Mr. Daisey’s story, originally broadcast on Jan. 6, was a 39-minute adaptation of his one-man theatrical show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” The show conveys and condemns the working conditions at Foxconn, and his storytelling helped to galvanize public concern about the production of popular products like the iPad and the iPhone.

But after hearing the radio story, Rob Schmitz, a China correspondent for another radio program, “Marketplace,” found holes in the stories Mr. Daisey told and worked with “This American Life” to disprove certain parts. The results will be broadcast by “This American Life” this weekend, as part of a full hour devoted to the retraction and the explanation.

In a report for “Marketplace” on Friday, Mr. Schmitz acknowledged that other people actually had witnessed harsh conditions at the factories that supplied Apple. “What makes this a little complicated,” he said, “is that the things Daisey lied about are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by hexane. Apple’s own audits show the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers. These things are rare, but together, they form an easy-to-understand narrative about Apple.”

Mr. Schmitz and other journalists have been covering working conditions at Apple suppliers for years. In one recent front-page article, The New York Times described the Chinese worker conditions in detail. The article was based on numerous sources, including some inside Apple, and involved reporting in China. Weeks later, Apple announced that an outside organization had begun to audit working conditions at factories where the products are made.

By being tarred as a fabulist, Mr. Daisey risks hurting the cause he is championing. For instance, in his theatrical show and on the radio, Mr. Daisey had described meeting mistreated Foxconn workers in southern China, relying on a translator to carry on the conversations. But in a later interview with Mr. Schmitz, the translator disputed some of the details of the meetings — like a worker whose hand was injured at a Foxconn plant seeing an iPad for the first time and calling it “magic” — and suggested that Mr. Daisey did not witness what he said he did.

When interviewed by Mr. Schmitz and Mr. Glass for this weekend’s program, Mr. Daisey said, “I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work.”

In a blog post Friday, he expressed regret for allowing his show to be repurposed on the radio because “This American Life” operates under journalistic rules and expectations that stage shows do not. “But this is my only regret,” he wrote. “I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.”

Apple declined to comment on the retraction.

Mr. Daisey made his case against Apple in other forums, including on television and, last October, in an Op-Ed article for The New York Times. On Friday, the newspaper added an editor’s note to the article online and removed a paragraph that described the worker with the injured hand.

The retraction by “This American Life” is an embarrassing and an unprecedented one for the program, a product of WBEZ, a radio station in Chicago. The program is distributed nationwide by Public Radio International and is partly dependent on donations from listeners.

When the story was first broadcast on Jan. 6, Mr. Glass had acknowledged the risk inherent in repurposing a monologue. After seeing the show on stage, he told listeners, “I wondered, did he get it right? And so we’ve actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show.”

What Mr. Glass didn’t tell listeners was that during the fact-checking process, there was at least one reason to doubt Mr. Daisey’s story. During the process, when Mr. Daisey was asked for the translator’s contact information, he said he had no way to reach her. He also said he changed her name in the show.

“At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” Mr. Glass said Friday. “But other things Daisey told us about Apple’s operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.”

Mr. Daisey’s one-man show opened last October to mostly positive reviews from critics and became a hit for both the actor and the Public Theater in New York, where tickets sold briskly. (The theater, like most Off Broadway companies, does not disclose its box-office figures.)

After it ended its relatively long run in December, executives at the Public Theater chose to bring back the work for an encore run in January and it has continued to be a popular draw.

In a statement on Friday, the theater said that Mr. Daisey’s show reveals “human truths in story form,” and added, “Mike is an artist, not a journalist. Nevertheless, we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn’t his personal experience in the piece.”

The play, coincidentally, is scheduled to end its latest run on Sunday.