This American Life is a great podcast, the stories they air are greatly produced and they go to great lengths to research them.

The episode “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”, aired on January, started a big backlash against Apple’s manufacturing operations and the fact they turn a blind eye to the terrible conditions the manufacturing workers are subjected to.

Today they are retracting that story.

[a Marketplace] China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week’s episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.”

The backlash this story generated did change the attitude of Apple, now they have become members of the Fair Labor Association and have become even more vocal about their standards of social responsibility across our worldwide supply chain.

Mike Daisey was wrong of abusing the loudspeaker that This American Life is, but I think he doesn’t really regret it, from his blog:

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

It’s going to be interesting to listen to next week’s TAL and find out what “creative licenses” Daisey took and what is the truth.

I agree with Daisey’s take that his stunt shaked the status quo. That is good. Lying to TAL and Ira Glass. Not cool.