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I am angry with Mike Daisey.
I am not angry that he lied in his show. I am saddened by that, saddened both
for him and for the integrity of his worthy cause, the working conditions of
the workers in China. I am saddened that his shows, for me, will now no longer
have any power, for Daisey’s artistic work depended on that sense that you were
hearing a personal, true account, told artfully.
What I am angry about is that, in an effort to save himself,
he threw theater under the bus.
When caught in his lies, Daisey’s defense was, what I do is not
journalism, it is theater. His
implication is that theater has different standards for truth, even when it
purports to be factual. That it is
OK to lie onstage, even when you are telling the audience what you are speaking
is the truth.
Ira Glass brought Daisey back on his show in order to remedy
the breach of trust between This American Life and the NPR audience, brought
about by their failure to fact check.
Daisey, apparently, has no similar compunctions. He is willing to implicate all of us
who sometimes try to tell the truth onstage, the factual truth, in his lie.
I understand, of course. I have lied. I
have lied when telling a story, not even deliberately, but because it’s quicker
and easier, and hey, it’s close enough.
I have struggled to tell documentary fact onstage, and I have been
forced at times to resort to fiction.
In a writing class, I recently gave my students an
exercise. Take down a conversation
verbatim, I said, and we will perform it like a play. They did.
Afterwards, I quizzed them—who had actually written down what was said
word for word, and who had fudged and filled in—to make the dialogue flow, or
to make it funnier, or to cover up an embarrassing moment, or just because it
was actually hard to remember and note the exact words.
Every single one of them had fudged. Every single one of them had lied.
(..and here, am I lying? One or two claimed to have told the truth, but reading the
dialogue, I didn’t believe them…so was what I just wrote a fudge or a lie?)
I have also been interviewed and written about in a number
of different papers, including, on several occasions, The New York Times.
I have to say, not once was the article written exactly factual. Sometimes the journalist has tried and
failed, fact checking but still missing some important details. Sometimes the journalist hasn’t even
tried. And often, the journalist
has wanted to tell a story of his or her own, and skewed the facts to fit into
that story.
Is it conscious?
Is it deliberate? Probably
not. But it is consistent.
Right now, I am General Managing a play called The Soap Myth, a play dealing the
question of fact and fiction. In
it, historians reject a certain possible truth about a detail of the Holocaust
events, because they feel that even the slightest doubt give deniers
power. When we all went to the
Museum of Jewish Heritage downtown, one of the curators was asked, when a
journalist writes about what you do, do they ever get it right?
No. Not once, I
was told.
So the truth is elusive. The truth is hard to define. And sometimes, even with the best of intention, one lies.
And then there are other times, when one makes the conscious
decision to lie. And rationalizes
it. And tell oneself it is the
truth, not because it is the truth, but because it feels like the truth.
Because even if the facts don’t fit, they should fit. So, it’s
not actually lying, is it?
It is.
It’s also very human.
I am not angry at Mike Daisey for being human. I am angry that his rationalizations will injure the whole
field of documentary fiction.
Those denials, those rationalizations, are also very human I
realize. I am holding Mike Daisey
to a high standard, perhaps an unfair one. A higher standard than most of the journalists I have
encountered. That is not despite
the fact that he works in theater.
It is because of it.
