The viral seems to have a close cousin in the almost true. Two recent sensational stories, Mike Daisey's monologue about working conditions at the Chinese factories that make Apple products, and the KONY 2012 video, both owe some of their potency, it turns out, to fabrications and simplifications of the truth.
The critical response to both stories shows that the journalistic immune system, both in the mainstream media and the blogosphere, is functioning properly against these viral fabrications. Particular credit, in the case of Mike Daisey's transgressions, go to Rob Schmitz at Marketplace who tracked down the Chinese translator and sorted out the actually true from the almost true.
And the practitioners of both fictions, Daisey and Invisible Children filmmaker Jason Russell, used similar defenses to explain the gaps between reality and their representations.
Daisey is in a doubly jeopardous position. He has been performing "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" at the Public Theatre in New York, and elsewhere—under the banner of "nonfiction"—for the past two years and he presented an excerpt of the play as "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory" at the beginning of this year on "This American Life." The seeming veracity of his presentation made me ask in a comment on one of my own posts about Daisey, "What does it say that some of our best journalists are comedians (or vice versa)?"
"This American Life" has since retracted the episode, and Daisey appeared on this week's show, which was devoted to the retraction. He explained to TAL's Ira Glass, "everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end – to make people care. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes – has made- other people delve."
For Jason Russell's part, he responded to the charges of "oversimplification of a complex issue" (which I have written about as well) by saying, "KONY 2012 portrays, in no uncertain terms, the image of a madman who manipulates children spiritually for his own tactical gains. In our quest to garner wide public support of nuanced policy, Invisible Children has sought to explain the conflict in an easily understandable format, focusing on the core attributes of LRA leadership that infringe upon the most basic of human rights. In a 30-minute film, however, many nuances of the 26-year conflict are admittedly lost or overlooked. The film is a first entry point to this conflict for many, and the organization provides several ways for our supporters to go deeper in learning about the make-up of the LRA and the history of the conflict."
Sounds similar, right? The manipulation of the truth to get you to care followed by the assertion that onus is on the audience to delve deeper. I'm sorry, but if something is being presented as true, as non-fiction, as journalism it should actually be true. New York Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood wrote in yesterday's paper, "But theater that aims to shape public opinion by exposing the world’s inequities has no less an obligation than journalism to construct its larger truths only from an accumulation of smaller ones." Both Daisey and Russell cut corners and convinced themselves that it was justified because the dramatic arc of the story is true.
Or maybe it's because, on some level, they understand how viruses work, by tricking the host cell into becoming a factory for their own replication. Perhaps the almost true is potent precisely because the audience has to bridge the gap of truth and in so doing become complicit in its viral spreading. The almost true needs us in a way that the actual truth does not. This is an established principle of theatre, of art, that the audience completes the illusion—makes it more real than real. Advertising uses similar techniques to increase consumers' alliance with a brand. Now Daisey is clearly an artist, and a good one at that, despite the over-reachings. Russell is clearly a marketer, and an incredibly skilled one at that. And both were motivated, at least at first, by an honest passion for their subjects.
But journalism is more science than art and requires independent verification. No wonder it has such a hard time competing with its viral cousin.
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