Last week the popular NPR show This American Life did something completely unprecedented in the history of the program. It retracted an entire episode.
This decision has garnered media attention for two reasons. First, This American Life (TAL) is a journalistic program that prides itself on factual integrity. Though it contains editorializing, it has also won awards for its probing research into the truth.
Second, the retraction drew attention because this particular episode was the most downloaded episode in the show’s history.
The episode in question featured an actor named Mike Daisey, who has been performing a one-man show titled “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which recounts his time in China investigating Apple’s production factories. His show is an exposfamp;copy; of the worker abuses he discovered there, and TAL featured excerpts from the show. Its airing was eye-opening for many, and resulted in heightened attention on Apple’s human rights policies and practices. Following the flood of goodwill toward Apple upon the passing of its CEO, this story marked a change in the tide.
Perhaps Apple, the company we know and love, is no different from all the other heartless international corporations out there. That seemed to be the lesson of Daisey’s story—until last week, that is, when we learned that Daisey had duped us all.
As it turns out, Daisey fabricated much of the story, which is a messy compilation of his own real-life experiences, the experiences of others, information he gathered from the news, anecdotal exaggerations, and flat-out lies.
Once this truth was uncovered, TAL found itself in a difficult position. Responding with transparency and humility, TAL devoted an entire episode to retracting the story. Host Ira Glass confessed his grave mistake and invited Daisey onto the show for a follow-up interview.
In the course of its “Retraction” episode, Glass held Daisey’s feet to the fire, but Daisey’s response was both frustrating and weird. It is tough to know whether Daisey was blatantly lying or swallowed up in denial, but he was unwilling to admit he had lied. He regretted allowing the story to be aired on TAL, but insisted that there was truth to it. After all, the episode had motivated listeners to care about human-rights violations. It was truth rendered in an artistic medium.
Since TAL aired its retraction, Daisey has become even more belligerent, clinging to his narrative of “artistic truth.” Though his story might be unacceptable by journalistic standards, he believes it is more than fitting for the stage. For Daisey, truth seems to be amorphous and flexible, so there are different ways of communicating it. (This week, finally, Daisey apologized for the story, writing on his blog that he had “failed to honor the contract I’d established with my audiences over many years and many shows.”)
This entire scandal has spawned numerous reflections on the importance of fact-checking, Apple’s factory conditions, and the nature of truth. CNN ran a piece that examined similar hoaxes, such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. However, the article also noted that the blurry line between fact and fiction is not limited to these strange exceptions. Students in a “News Literacy” class at Seton Hall University had no objection to Daisey’s version of truth, so long as it captured the larger “emotional truth.”
Daisey’s and the students’ reactions could be a sign of postmodernism run amok. But I tend to think it has more to do with the current culture of truth-telling. Or the lack thereof.
Although the line between truth and lies would seem to be a clear one, American public discourse exists comfortably in a tension between the two. As the presidential election gears up, we are inundated with statements that purport to be true but are really exaggerations of the truth, or selective perspectives on the truth. Half-truths, if you will.
Bible scholar Arthur W. Pink once wrote, “Error is truth perverted, truth distorted, truth out of proportion.” Though this type of error is common in the political arena, it is not limited to this sphere. In the church there is also a temptation to stretch or distort reality. In critiquing non-Christians or Christians with whom we disagree, it is easy to misrepresent their position, stating their case in a manner that they themselves would not agree with. And like Daisey, we faithful are prone to sensationalize a problem or exaggerate our ministry success if the end result is passion for a cause, especially a cause as great as Christ.
Truth-telling, for Christians, goes beyond knowing the Bible and having the ability to cite it on command. Instead, truth, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, must be practiced.
In Bonhoeffer’s major work Ethics, he asserts that “telling the truth is something which must be learned,” so truth-telling is about more than character or even rightness. Stanley Hauerwas elaborates on this point, saying, “We must develop the skills of description to tell the truth,” adding that speaking truthfully is a skill that not only requires attention to “what we say but how we say it.”
Bonhoeffer and Hauerwas belong to a long tradition of Christian thought that takes seriously the nuances and obstacles to speaking truthfully. Because the heart is “deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9), speaking truth is no simple task. It requires honesty, thought, and even study.
In a world where truth is perceived to be somewhat relative, few take the time to make themselves students of the truth. But as Christians we cannot afford not to be. As image-bearers of the incarnate Truth, there is a lot at stake in speaking truthfully. Hyperbole and sloppy speech cannot abide. If we are to speak the truth in a way that sets people free and points them to the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we must regularly scrutinize our words for even the slightest hint of deception. In a culture of half-truth, this is what being salt and light demands.