Monday, March 19, 2012

21st century Journalism

I am not the biggest fan of Apple, but I have to admit that the Mike Daisy incident was dreadfully unfair to them.  Outsourcing to Adam Ozimek:
This is not consistent with anyone being able to walk up to Foxconn and within two hours be talking to underage workers. The story Daisey tells is one where Apple is negligent to an obvious and easily solved problem, whereas the facts TAL reports are of a company trying to stop underage workers and failing on relatively rare occasions. This kind of lie is not telling the story of the truth through a fictional narrative, but creating a fictional narrative that contradicts the bigger truth.
Felix Salmon also has some tough commentary on this issue. The key point here seems to be that it makes a great deal of difference what the facts are.  Outright falsehoods are an issue and it is terrifying that such obvious lies passed the fact checkers or that people feel like a defense can be mounted for this behavior as being in "in the greater good" (that the fictional narrative might be exposing hidden truths that are hard to show facts on). 

We should do better.   

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