Mike Daisey's initial episode was very moving. I sensed it was overly dramatic though. Daisey is a very dramatic story teller. That he allowed his story to pass as journalism is unfortunate and, in my mind, his biggest sin. Clearly Daisey felt bad about this and it was the thing for which he apologized most profusely in the retraction episode. I appreciated that. But Ira Glass wouldn't let it stop there. He pushed Daisey to admit that it was a work of fiction. Daisey didn't want to and Ira became increasingly frustrated.
Ira was interested in calling it "fiction" and Daisey a "liar" so that more of the blame was on Daisey and less on TAL. While understandable, I don't think that's right. Stories can have more relationships to reality than non-fiction and fiction.
Daisey was right to insist that in the context of theater, there may be different conceptions of fact and fiction. In creative work there is something called "historical fiction" which means that the historical time period is, in various ways, depicted truthfully but the story itself is invented. Or the book Animal Farm... the specific story, of course, cannot be read as non-fiction. Animals cannot talk or start a revolution. On the other hand, taken as a metaphor there is a sense in which the novel is absolutely historically accurate.
Honestly I felt like Ira was trying to smear Daisey. When Daisey said that he thought they had different world views about the nature of fiction/non-fiction, Ira pressed and said that he thinks that his own view is the "normal" one. It just seemed like he wanted Daisey to look like a crazy person who has no respect for the difference between pure imagination and concrete facts.
Daisey certainly lied about what kind of work he did, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the work itself was a lie. That said, Daisey has to qualify his work differently regardless of where/how he releases it. When you tell a story that is so close to the standards of journalism without meeting those standards, we have to question whether your intentions are to mislead listeners. Which means that Daisey should have been extra forthcoming about how his story should be heard by listeners. I hope this is the lesson he learned, because with the proper qualifications I still think the initial story has great value.
A final point... TAL is not always journalistic. David Sideris has told fables on the show which involve forest critters talking and acting like human beings. I'm sure there are other examples of blatantly fictional stories that have aired. The point is that Daisey's show needed more transparency. Calling it "fiction" rather than "journalism" is just a different misrepresentation.
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