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Some Unanswered Questions About This American Life

 

(This American Life is a weekly award-winning program heard over many National Public Radio stations in the United States.  Typically, each program deals with a single issue, event, or question. Although the series is eclectic with respect to its content, and how that content is presented to its audience, it is definitely classified as non-fiction, often as journalism, and is thought of by its staff in that way.  Interviews with people who have fires in their bellies and something to say, live sound, and articulate contextual explanations are produced to the highest standards.  But even the best of programs can run into trouble—and how they respond can also be to the highest standard.  In March, 2012, This American Life announced, with extensive promotion. that it was using its time slot, its precious hour of air time that week, for a retraction, an apology, and an analysis rebutting its own program some weeks earlier of a program about labor standards in Chinese factories that produce many of Apple’s electronic products in use around the world.


Many retractions are buried on an inside page, or presented at 5:10 a.m., couched in words that mention only the bare bones of what had gone wrong, out of context, and avoiding taking on more blame than is absolutely necessary. But This American Life, as soon as it could put together a corrective program that met its high standards, reexamined the story and the flaws and how the original program had been produced and presented. It named names, interviewed those involved (both interviewers and interviewees), drew conclusions, assessed responsibility, and almost certainly stimulated the ethics juices of its staff—all in the same time period as the original program. This program was, in many—but not all—respects, the "gold standard" of retractions.


But even this rare and fascinating hour of radio journalism didn’t cover everything that should (or might) have been covered.  Steve Myers and Craig Silverman, of the Poynter Institute, thought beyond the two This American Life programs, and asked a number of questions and pointed out a number of factors both in these shows and earlier ones that still need consideration by those in the field of journalism.  The following article originally was published on March 20, 2012 on the Poynter.org Web site. Media Ethics magazine is grateful to the authors of this piece, and to Poynter for permission to reprint this slightly revised version of their argument: that more needs to be done to enhance ethical standards, even of one of the best examples of "long-form" broadcast journalism extant today.)

                                                                                                                   JMK

 

It’s rare for a program to dedicate an entire episode to retracting a previous episode and to issue a press release explaining why, in this case, This American Life has put so much time and so many resources into retracting "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory."


But just as the vetting process for the episode didn’t manage to reveal the true story of Mike Daisey’s trip to China, the retraction itself leaves many unanswered questions. The show dissects Daisey’s lies, but says little about the editorial process at This American Life.


Ira Glass (host of This American Life) admitted that airing the initial Daisey program was "a screw-up" and that they "should’ve killed" it when Daisey didn’t provide a way to reach his Chinese translator. Glass explained that a producer spent days talking to Daisey via phone and e-mail, "spoke with 13 people who are knowledgeable about Apple or about electronics manufacturing in China," and read related reports.


What we don’t know is how any of that compares to the vetting for other This American Life episodes. Does the show have a rigorous fact-checking system like that of The New Yorker, which sent the Church of Scientology 971 questions for a story last year? Or is it more like the honor system, in which producers assume that a contributor is being honest unless something doesn’t add up? Judging by Glass’ description on the show, the answer is somewhere in the middle.


What Remains Unanswered


Here are the questions we’d like This American Life to answer:

 

 

This American Life isn’t ready to answer these questions right now.


We e-mailed to ask if Ira Glass would discuss the show’s editorial process, but office manager Emily Condon said the show isn’t doing interviews, in part because of the deluge of requests and because a couple of producers who worked on the shows in question are traveling.

"We feel that the show we ran this weekend addresses the issues at play in depth," she said in an e-mail.


Fictional Journalism/Journalistic Fiction


This American Life is such a fascinating and revealing show because it’s not like anything else. A few years ago, blown away by its deconstruction of the subprime mortgage crisis, Steve Myers explained why the show is so compelling: "This American Life has developed a way to tell stories that sound fictional, but are narrated by interesting people you can’t help believing."


That earlier episode about the economics of the housing mortgage market won Peabody, duPont-Columbia and George Polk awards, and it’s not the only one with such laurels. Just this February, Ira Glass won a Polk award for the episode "Very Tough Love," about the severe punishments meted out by a drug court in Georgia.


On the other hand, the show has a long history of airing personal narratives that don’t seem to us to be particularly journalistic.


The staff of This American Life seems to relish staking out a middle ground:


We think of the show as journalism. One of the people who helped start the program, Paul Tough, says that what we’re doing is applying the tools of journalism to everyday lives, personal lives. Which is true. It’s also true that the journalism we do tends to use a lot of the techniques of fiction: scenes and characters and narrative threads.


Meanwhile, the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism: it’s fiction that describes what it’s like to be here, now, in America. What we like are stories that are both funny and sad. Personal and sort of epic at the same time.


This dual sensibility is a big reason why This American Life has legions of fans. The challenge, though, is how the show sets expectations for listeners who may hear an in-depth exploration of the perfect break-up song during one hour and a critical examination of "patent trolls" the next.


Glass got at a similar issue in the retraction episode, when he asked Daisey if he would start telling people that his monologue was a work of fiction with some true elements. When Daisey argued that the theater audience has a mushier conception of truth-telling and that he was interested in drama, Glass responded, "People take it as literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. [Producer Brian Reed], who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true."  In late March, Daisey amended the dramatic monologue show about Chinese factories that he does in theaters as a result of the on-air retraction.


People may have some of these same questions about what they hear on This American Life. In a comment on a Poynter story about the Daisey retraction, Reuters’ deputy social media editor Matthew Keys asked, "This American Life is certainly a good storytelling program, but should it be regarded as journalism?"


In the original Daisey episode, Glass did call it journalism, describing Daisey as an "amateur reporter" who used "investigative techniques" that few reporters would use. But "he’s not a reporter, and I wondered, did he get it right? And so we’ve actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show. … We have gone through his script and fact-checked everything that was checkable."


Again in "Retraction," Glass emphasized the show’s journalistic standards:


I was a reporter and a producer for the big daily news shows before I started this program, and we follow the same rules of reporting here that I followed there. We vet and we check our stories and when we present something to you as true, it’s because we believe in its factual accuracy.


And yet now we listen differently to a few stories broadcast years ago on This American Life that perhaps are too good to be true. One described a terrible experience with a FedEx shipment. Another brought you behind the scenes of Mount Vernon’s highly selective field worker internship, complete with wry jokes about slavery.


In another, a man tells some incredible stories about what it was like to work as a telephone psychic. The man says one caller told him that her father had beaten her with a bicycle chain when his pro football team failed to score. Now her husband was having sex with another woman. In the next room. While she was on the phone with the psychic.


The person who brought those stories to This American Life? He was a journalist whose name you may remember: Stephen Glass.