[gcp123]

What makes this fascinating isn't just what it says about storytelling, but what it reveals about our relationship with truth in media. I worked in public radio for 7 years, and TAL's influence was impossible to overstate - every producer wanted to craft stories with that perfect narrative arc.

The Daisey episode still haunts journalism programs. We used it as a case study in our ethics workshops. The truly unsettling part wasn't just Daisey's fabrications, but how perfectly those lies fit into TAL's storytelling template - dramatic scenes, sympathetic characters, narrative tension, and a tidy resolution that makes you feel something.

Glass wasn't wrong about storytelling's power to make people listen. But the Daisey incident showed its dangers - when your format rewards emotional impact and narrative elegance, you create incentives for sources to deliver exactly that, truthful or not.

The saddest part is that real stories about Foxconn's labor conditions existed that could have been told without fabrication. But they wouldn't have had that perfect "old man touching an iPad for the first time" moment that makes for such a perfect radio beat.

[rayiner]

How has the story about the Duke Lacrosse players been processed in the journalism schools?

[cratermoon]

The funny thing is, Daisey was not the first time narrative journalism – aka documentary media – has waltzed down the path to fiction. Famously, we have the film Nanook of the North and the book Wisconsin Death Trip, case studies I covered when I was in journalism program, before TAL. Today, we might call these works docudrama, but the blurring of the line between drama and journalism remains.

[tpmoney]

There was also that Der Spiegel journalist that wrote effectively a completely made up fiction about an American town called "Fergus Falls. The followup investigation of which discovered a number of additional stories that ranged from highly exaggerated to completely made up.

The danger of trying to tell a narrative with journalism is the tendency to decide on the narrative you want to tell, and gather facts (or I guess make them up) to fit that narrative, rather than finding a narrative in the fact that lets you tell their story.

[jfengel]

And the story is in fact largely true. Daisey is a storyteller, not a journalist, and TAL is not a news program.

The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the get-go... and so should Glass.

TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up by people who themselves are being uncritical.

[glenstein]

The story was true is your takeaway? A key piece of the article is that Rob Schmitz of Marketplace listened, thought something was off, and after digging found 13 lies in the story:

>Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true.

This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.

[jfengel]

I'm drawing a narrow but crucial distinction between telling true stories and journalism.

Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation unless you've ascertained their sincerity.

That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news" doesn't even try, but journalists do exist.

TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion, etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over the line they obliterated it.

So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.

[glenstein]

>have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist

I continue to be completely baffled by this explanation. I'm not sure I agree with this distinction you're making, which seems retrofitted to the specifics of this particular conversation, rather than an organic and clear cut conceptual distinction I've encountered in the wild. And even if the distinction were true, I don't think it has anything to do with the reason why this particular story failed. This American Life has been perfectly up to the task over and over again of vetting the stories and not running into this problem, so I would vehemently disagree with the idea that it's something built into the nature of their programming that made this happen when we're talking about one story out of, I don't know, 700 and counting.

I'm also not sure where the idea is coming from that a TAL story must originate independently from a journalist, and that not doing so constitutes a "tell" about the reliability of the story. Most of their stories originate from what you might typically call a source or what I might say as a person, a character, a personality, any of the raw material from which all stories are sourced. And while I do believe TAL sometimes works with third-party reporters, they also use in-house producers because they themselves are perfectly capable of being that journalistic origination of the story through which we understand it to be vetted.

Also weren't you originally saying that the story was true? I'm not sure what happened to that, but I'm finding no trace of explanation for that in this new volley of distinctions about the meaning of journalism.

[TeMPOraL]

The distinction indeed needs to be drawn carefully, because as I understand you, you're not describing an "other side" compared to journalism - you're describing a thin intermediary layer between journalism and the kind of outlets like e.g. Top Gear, that let people treat them as a lighthearted but factual source, then occasionally do a hit job on something or someone, and when damage they did is pointed out, proclaim "but we are an entertainment program, not news, so we don't have any obligation to be factual and accurate!".

Because of such cases, when I see someone (like you here) argue "X is not a journalist, Y is not a news program", my mind automatically pattern-matches this to ", therefore it has no obligation to tell the truth, despite the fact that they let people believe they're journalists/news". Which is not what you meant here, but common enough that I doubt this is just mine knee-jerk reaction.

[ben_w]

I've experienced making this mistake myself.

The UK has Private Eye magazine. Because of their habit of making the front page a picture captioned with a joke[0], I assumed that's all they were for the first 15 years of me knowing the magazine existed.

Despite them also being famous for facing a lot of legal threats (and cases) for libel[1], it wasn't until the mid 2010s that I realised they're also known for in-depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=private+eye+front+page&t=osx&iar=i...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-15279371

[IshKebab]

What are you talking about? It was a complete fabrication. There is no true story.

[pessimizer]

> The story was true is your takeaway?

I think this was the takeaway of the entire industry. Daisey gave an admission that was basically a performance, and the message of that performance was "I was dishonest, and being dishonest is terribly morally wrong, but being dishonest made the story more true, and if therefore I have to be morally wrong to deliver the real truth, I'll have to take the blame."

Typical middle-class post-mortem after getting caught.

That happened during a time when we expected the mainstream news to be literally true, even if told from a particular perspective. If Daisey's story were politically valuable to someone today, however, every outlet would simply agree not to report on it. They'd just refer back to it in articles about Foxconn as "allegations spread around right-wing twitter about the supposed bias of a journalist who reported the story."

[makomk]

It's certainly not the only evidence of problems at NPR. For example, they managed to basically accuse Trump Jr of lying to Congress in a story that should not have survived basic fact checking: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after...

That Fox News piece actually understates how big of a screw-up this was. The key quote that supposedly showed Trump Jr claiming his dad's possible real estate deal in Russia had faded away by 2016, the one that was supposedly contradicted by Cohen's court testimony about ongoing negotiations, was in response to questioning about any possible deals other than the one Cohen was involved in - and in particular one specific potential deal with a different group of people. It's not just that it was brought up elsewhere in other answers that NPR missed. Merely looking at the immediate context of that key quote, the most basic thing we should expect of old-fashioned fact checking, should've been enough to flag the problem. The fact those other negotiations had in fact been brought up was literally the whole basis for that line of questioning.

[grandempire]

Arranging facts into a narrative with mass appeal is the craft of journalism.

[lazyeye]

Or cherry-picking facts to support a narrative? This seems far more common in the mainstream media.

[grandempire]

I think cherry-picking is inherent to the craft. As a pejorative it probably means the chosen arrangement of facts is poorly constructed.