Well Done, Ira Glass

Last night, I actually paid attention to the whole broadcast of This American Life rather than simply letting it run as background to doing something else. I listened because Ira Glass, its creator and host, used the whole hour to hold Mike Daisey accountable for passing off fabrication as fact.

Ira, you rock.

Mike, you don't.

I had heard the broadcast in January of the adaptation of Mike Daisey's monologue about his visit to Chinese factories that manufacture Apple iPhones and iPads. I don't own any Apple products. Since I don't remember having heard of him before, it was, at the time, an interesting segment on an interesting show by someone whose name I didn't catch at the beginning and didn't remember the next day. As it happened, I saw Mike Daisey on a Sunday morning news show a few weeks later; what puzzled me then was that he was identified as a Monologist. I made a mental note to look him up; since it wasn't a sticky note, it didn't stick in my brain, and I didn't.

However, when I heard Ira's spot on Saturday about the upcoming show on Sunday evening, that mental note was activated and Mike Daisey's face from the news show came into my mind. And that's why I paid particular attention to the show yesterday.

Ira, his colleague Rob Schmitz, and Mike's translator Cathy did a superb job of connecting the dots for this listener in Radioland. What sticks in my mind today from Mike's comments is that he claims that his purpose in stretching the truth for listeners in Radioland in January (and, evidently, in his live-theater monolog performances before and since) was to "make people care."

Hmmm.

A question for you, Mike: why did you assume that we wouldn't care if we heard only the truth?

As I listened to Rob, Cathy, Ira and you last night, one of our contemporaries came to mind, another person who wants people to care--and who has brought interview footage of real people to us to show and tell us why we should. His name is Michael Moore. He, too, could gloss things over, dress them up and sell them to us as truth, but he knows that truth, positive or negative, can always stand on its own, and he lets it.

I also thought of my friend Jesse Nemerofsky, currently a photographer for Zuma Press with a one-man show of his work hanging in a gallery in Providence, RI. Jesse has gone where the truth is, photographed it for us, and put it in our faces truthfully--no apologies, no window-dressing. And no need to hide access to corroborators, like you hid Cathy.

Hmmm.

It feels to me as if Mike really didn't care much about what people like me think because he assumed that telling me his truth honestly wouldn't be enough to make me think or care. And that brings another question to my mind.

Mike, if you can't tell your truth well enough to make me care about it, why do you think I'll care if you don't tell me the truth?

Hmmm. Good job, Rob, for finding Cathy and checking out what you, too, heard on This American Life in January. Thanks, Cathy, for telling the truth. Ira, you were wonderful at holding Mike's feet to the fire; if Mike had been honest with you and your staff earlier, none of you would have needed to put last night's show together.

Mike, tell the truth. After all, when we find it, it is stranger and more wonderful than fiction. And, if you aren't a good enough storyteller to make the truth interesting for me, perhaps you should take some lessons from the public radio people. They do it every day.