OOPS

Apple Factory Story Retracted

By “This American Life” for fabrication.

The popular weekly program This American Life is devoting its entire broadcast this week to explaining why it is retracting its January episode entitled “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.” The show said Friday on its website that it had “regrettably … discovered one of our most popular episodes was partially fabricated,” going on to say that the episode released today “devote[s] the entire hour to detailing the errors” from the retracted show. Another radio show, Marketplace, was said to have raised doubts over Daisey’s story. The episode explaining the retraction also includes an interview with Mike Daisey, the show’s primary source for the January episode, about why “he misled TAL during the fact-checking process.” TAL’s website was experiencing intermittent service Friday afternoon, presumably because of the amount of Web traffic it was receiving. New York Times columnist Nick Bilton called it the show’s “Oprah & James Frey moment” on Twitter. Meanwhile, Daisey issued a response on his personal site, writing: “I stand by my work … What I do is not journalism … I regret that I allowed This American Life to air an excerpt from my monologue … But this is my only regret.”