公共电台《美国生活》撤销了一篇中国报道，并称该稿子不该播出。（透露一下：我正在为《美国生活》写一篇不同的稿子，计划今年稍晚些时候播出。）撤稿是大话王迈克·戴西写的，讲述他到中国深圳苹果供货商富士康公司大门口采访的经历。他声称采访了数百名工人，发现有12、13岁大的女童工，以及受擦拭iPhone屏幕的化学制剂影响，有工人“双手抖动不停”。他说他也采访了其他代工厂，看到宿舍房间对着床安装的监控录像，有点像“科幻反乌托邦的《银翼杀手》、《1984》之类的胡说八道[嘟嘟]（译者注：美国新闻广播有规定：脏话一律过滤。原文Bull应该是Bullshit的缩写，即胡说八道的意思，Shit被嘟嘟声过滤掉了。）。”最后，他绕着弯子警告我们消费者：“今天他们就是那样制造你们使用的垃圾货。”
可是戴西满嘴谎言。一切都是他编造的，节目组曾试图核对事实，可惜没能揭穿谎言。直到罗布·施米茨插手此事才真相大白。罗布·施米茨是公共电台节目《市场》的资深中国记者，他对戴西的报道起了疑心，找到为戴西工作的翻译。这个过程很值得好好听一听，不过还是长话简说吧，施米茨发现戴西造假的证据，他从没写过采访记录，工人的事情张冠李戴，没去采访过工人宿舍等等。看到谎言在北京被揭穿让我好奇：关于我们如何看待中国这个问题，这次穿帮说明了什么？为什么会有这么多人愿意相信它？
原稿播出时，我（和许多在华的记者一样）认为报道不靠谱。我们彼此抱怨这篇报道令人压抑，满篇陈词滥调----用《银翼杀手》作比喻是描述中国城市最老套的台词----但是罗布·施米茨却实实在在花时间进行调查，为此他应该受到赞扬。
任何在中国生活过的人都会对报道中数处地方起疑：1）带枪的卫兵（有可能，但是在我采访过的工厂中从未见过；在中国，通常只有士兵或武装押运的司机才可以携带枪支）；2）开车驶出高速出口结果发现钢筋外露，道路未完工（本地的出租司机通常清楚哪个出口未完工）；3）与自称12、13岁的女童工见面（即便她们未成年，她们也不会糊涂到在持枪卫兵面前瞎说一通）；4）无知的工人竟然从未考虑过改善工厂的条件，直到戴西跟他们讲过才恍然大悟（我从哪里入手呢？）；这一条也许是最关键的 5）他认为到工厂门口和与工人谈话是激进的新闻工作创新。他向香港的记者讲述他的计划，在他的报道中，他说这些记者回应说：“那与我们在中国通常的采访很不一样。”
真是滑稽可笑。到工厂大门口去采访正是记者在中国所做的。但是当我听到他的报道时，还是有点尴尬，想到有可能戴西发现了我们这些在中国的记者所没发现的东西。在过去的几年里，很多人报道过童工和工作环境糟糕的问题，但是通常这类报道只是呼吁出台复杂的限制条件，讨论工厂应该努力杜绝雇佣童工（以及增加更多的限制条件，限制可能的疏漏）。但是，我总结，在中国总是怪事频出。即使开车驶出高速出口没了路也是有可能的。更严重的是，我担心也许戴西以新人的愤怒和调查热情调查此事，他可能发现我们许多常年在这里的人所没发现的东西。
造成戴西闭门造车的一部分原因是他以洞察一切的新人身份出现：穿着花衬衫出现在工厂大门口（顺便说一下，那一部分属实），问一些自以为可以揭露惊人事实真相的简单问题。但是令人好奇的是，戴西的失败最终证明在某种程度上，他天真幼稚得连他自己都没搞明白。他以为中国遥远而富有异国风情，他编造谎言无人会查实真相；正如他在随后的访谈中提到的，“他一心想成名，走点捷径”没什么大不了的。（当然，那也是陈词滥调，与珍妮特·库克以来的所有大话王的讲话如出一辙。）（译者注：华盛顿邮报记者珍妮特·库克1980年发表《吉米的世界》，并因此获得普利策新闻奖，后来被人揭穿报道内容子虚乌有。）
可是实际上中国并不遥远。戴西谎话的基础是，外国人基本上搞不懂中国，记者从来不去工厂门口采访，高速出口没有路。如果是20年前，他的谎言也许可以侥幸成功。可是如今，中国不再是遥不可及。今天中国生产一台iPhone，下周就会摆在美国商店货架上。还有另外一种意义上的紧密联系----戴西高估了自己的能力，低估了许多人。他没想到的是，那篇报道的播客听众通常对报道的内容十分了解：美国海外侨民很可能比任何其他人群更依赖播客，因为在中国很难搞到书、杂志和电台广播故事。
他的报道一开始是成功的，因为它满足了我们许多人对中国和苹果公司的主观臆断。在某种程度上，任何人只要仔细思考就会怀疑iPhone的价格实在是低得太离谱，那也是为什么人们对苹果施压，希望把价格降得更低些的原因。从那个意义上讲，尽管戴西说谎和表演穿帮，他的臆想也还是有一点点儿真相：今天他们就是那样制造你们使用的垃圾货。嗯，虽然不全属实，但是多少有点这个意思。
《美国生活》的艾勒·格拉斯为报道不实致歉，该节目结尾查尔斯·都希格谈论在中国的苹果代工厂，后者与大卫·巴博萨合作在《纽约时报》写了一篇调查报告。该文探讨了都希格称为“两桶”问题----即艰苦的工作和生活条件以及生命安全问题----他出色地阐述了问题的方方面面。他也谈到在苹果方面提供消息的人士当中（包括对许多离职和在职员工的采访），观点也大相径庭。都希格和他同事们的报告复杂而精彩。在采访的末尾，都希格实际对我们大家----苹果的消费者----讲述（苹果代工厂）工作条件的问题：“如果你做了不同的选择，如果你要求改变工作条件，如果你要求其他人像你一样享受同样工作保障，那么海外代工厂的条件就会改变。”
听到这里，我不禁想到这不正是迈克·戴西着手去做而没做成的吗。《纽约时报》做到了，在某种程度上，在中国听起来很真实。
“This American Life,” the public-radio show, has retracted a China piece that it says it never should’ve run. (Disclosure: I’m doing an unrelated piece for “This American Life” that’s scheduled to be broadcast later this year.) The retracted story was by a monologist named Mike Daisey, who described journeying to the gates of Foxconn, the Apple supplier in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. He said he interviewed hundreds of workers, finding girls who were twelve and thirteen years old and others whose “hands shake uncontrollably” from chemicals used to clean iPhone screens. He said he visited other factories and saw surveillance cameras over the beds in dorm rooms, some kind of “sci-fi, dystopian, ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘1984’ bull[BLEEP].” And in the end, he winds his warning around to us, the consumers: “They’re making your crap that way today.”
But Daisey lied. He made up things about his trip, and the show’s attempts at fact-checking failed to uncover them. It all fell apart when Rob Schmitz, a seasoned reporter who is the China correspondent for the public-radio program “Marketplace,” got suspicious and tracked down the translator who’d worked with Daisey. It’s worth a listen, but, in short, Schmitz discovers that Daisey made up scenes, never took notes, conflated workers, never visited a dorm room, and so on. Watching it unravel from Beijing makes me wonder: What does the debacle say about how we all look at China? Why were so many people so eager to believe it?
When the original piece ran, I (and a lot of reporters in China) thought it sounded off. We complained to each other about the breathlessness and the clichés—the “Blade Runner” comparison is the hoariest line about Chinese cities—but Rob Schmitz actually took the time to follow up, for which he should be applauded.
Several places in the narrative sounded fishy to anyone who has spent much time here: 1) the gun-toting guards (maybe, but not at the factories I’ve seen; in China, guns usually belong to soldiers or armored-car drivers); 2) driving down a highway exit that ended with rebar jutting out into thin air (local taxi drivers usually know which exits aren’t finished); 3) meeting workers who said they were twelve and thirteen years old (even if they were underage, they were probably too smart to blab about it in front of the gun-toting guards); 4) workers who were such innocents that they’d never considered what they would change about the factories until Daisey asked them (where do I start?); and, perhaps most of all, 5) his description of going to the factory gates and talking to workers as a radical innovation in journalism. When he told journalists in Hong Kong about his plan, he said in his piece, they replied: “That’s not really how we usually do things in China.”
That was a howler. Going to the factory gates is exactly what reporters do in China. But when I heard it, a part of me was embarrassed by the prospect that maybe Daisey had found stuff that we in China had not. Lots of people had reported over the years on underage workers and harsh conditions, but very often the stories require complicated qualifications, debates about the efforts that factories take to guard against hiring underage workers (and—more qualifications—about the ones who slip through anyway). But, I concluded, weird things happen in China all the time. Even driving down the highway exit was sort of plausible. And, more seriously, I feared that maybe Daisey had approached the subject with such fresh outrage and investigative vigor that he had been able to find what so many over here had not.
Part of Daisey’s conceit was that he presented himself as a clear-eyed naïf: he would show up at the factory gate in a Hawaiian shirt (that part was true, by the way) and ask people simple questions that exposed uncomfortable truths. But, in a curious way, Daisey’s undoing was that he turned out to be naïve in a way that he didn’t understand. He thought that China was so exotic and far away that it was uncheckable; that it was okay to take “a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” as he put it in his follow-up interview. (That’s a cliché too, of course, borrowed from every fabulist since Janet Cooke.)
But China, it turns out, is not so far away. Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that China is essentially unknowable, that reporters never go to factory gates, that highways exit to nowhere. And he might have gotten away with it twenty years ago. But these days, it’s no longer so far away at all. It’s close enough to make an iPhone today and have it on a U.S. store shelf next week. And it’s closer in another important way as well—in overestimating his own ability, Daisey underestimated a lot of other people. He didn’t realize that podcasts are often followed by listeners with real knowledge on his subject: American expats who probably rely even more on podcasts than other people because it’s so difficult to get books and magazines and radio stories over here.
His story was initially a success because it satisfied so many of our casual assumptions about China and Apple. On some level, anybody who thinks it through has suspected that iPhone prices are a bit too good to be true, and that’s why pressure is building on Apple to do better. In that sense, despite the botched show and Daisey’s lies, his fiction has a wisp of truth to it: They’re making your crap that way today. Well, no, but sort of.
The mea culpa from Ira Glass on “This American Life” ends with a conversation about Apple in China with Charles Duhigg, who co-wrote an investigative story in the Times with David Barboza. It explores what Duhigg calls “two buckets” of issues—harsh conditions and life-threatening conditions—and he does a good job of explaining the ins and outs. He also talks about the diversity of opinions among Apple sources, based on many interviews with staff, former and current. The stories by Duhigg and his colleagues have been complicated and excellent. At the end of his interview, Duhigg talks, in effect, to all of us—the Apple consumers—about the problem of working conditions: “If you made different choices, if you demanded different conditions, if you demanded that other people enjoy the same work protections that you yourself enjoy, then those conditions would be different overseas.”
