Mike Daisey apologizes for lying to Ross and Burbank

After dancing around it for a
week, embattled writer and performer Mike Daisey is officially apologizing for
all of the fabrications in his stage show about working
conditions at an Apple factory in China, in particular to
Ross and Burbank.

“When I said onstage that I had personally experienced
things I in fact did not, I failed to honor the contract
I’d established with my audiences over many years and
many shows. In doing so, I not only violated their trust,
I also made worse art.”

“This is not the place for me to try and explain my
good intentions. We all know where the road paved with
good intentions leads. In fact, I think it might lead to
where I’m sitting right now,” Daisey wrote on his blog.

Daisy has been under fire since the public radio show
“This
American Life” retracted an episode about Daisy’s one-
man show “The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs.”

He began his blog
post with an excerpt from his interview with Ross and
Burbank last year:

Burbank: How do you reconcile telling a good story
with also trying to get the facts right and when do you
decide what is the more important goal?

Daisey: Oh, well you know what I’ve found over the
years is that the facts are your friends, like if there’s
ever a case where I’m telling the story and I find
the facts are inconvenient, 9 times out of 10 it means I
haven’t thought about the story deeply enough. I really
believe in this because the world is more complex and more
interesting than my imagination. So the world is full of
really fascinating things. You have so many tools on stage
as a storyteller. Like, any time you want something to
happen, you don’t have to pretend it happened and lie,
you can use a flight of fancy, you can say, I imagine
what this must look like. You can say anything and you
can go in whatever direction you need to go, but be clear
with the audience, but be clear with the audience that at
one moment you’re reporting the truth as literally it
happened, and another case you’re using hyperbole, and
you just have to be really clear about when you’re using
each tool. No, for me it’s not actually that hard if “and
this is a big if” if you’re pretty scrupulous
about not believing you know the story before you see
it

But Daisey admitted in his apology (not in so many
words) he lied.

“I speak about truth because it is what I aspire to.
All my stories, even when I’ve fallen short, have been
attempts to experience the truth with my audiences,” Daisy
wrote.

“I am sorry for where I have failed. I will look
closer, be more patient, and listen more clearly.”

“The bad news is he’s probably damaged his ticket sales
going forward. On the other hand, he’s got a hell of a new
monologue to write about,” Burbank responded.

“If he wants to come on this show, if he wants to
somehow offend us and then apologize to us in a very
public way, we welcome Mike Daisy back as a guest with
open arms.”