By Jessica Roy 3/26/12 4:02pm

After After the Fact

Mr. Daisey

Mike Daisey Finally Gives the Apology The Media Has Been Waiting For

After a swath of deflection attempts and half-apologies, notorious truth-exaggerator and Apple opponent Mike Daisey has finally issued the genuine apology we’ve all been waiting for.

In an entry posted to his blog yesterday, Mr. Daisey apologized to everyone who ever paid him a modicum of attention, including his audience, theater coworkers, journalists and human rights advocates, for exaggerating the negative details of Apple’s Chinese factory conditions on “This American Life.” Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 3/20/12 9:15am

After the Fact

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Mike Daisey Will Deconstruct His Agony and Ecstasy: ‘I Will Be Making a Full Accounting of This Work’

On his personal blog yesterday, Mike “The Boy Who Cried Foxconn” Daisey responded to Ira Glass’s public shaming and retraction of excerpts of his monologue that aired on “This American Life.”

“I thought the dead air was a nice touch, and finishing the episode with audio pulled out of context from my performance was masterful,” wrote Mr. Daisey, who seemed to object to being lumped into the same category as James Frey and Stephen Glass.

“Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers,” Mr. Daisey wrote with pride. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 6:13pm

Apple in Your Eye

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At His Last New York Performance, Mike Daisey Wins Crowds Over with Fabricated Tales of Foxconn

Gawker may be on a witch hunt to catalog every lie and half-truth Mike Daisey has ever uttered, but audiences at the final performance of  his one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” were much more forgiving. In fact, the crowd at yesterday’s matinee performance, Mr. Daisey’s final showing at The Public Theater on Lafayette, gave the second-coming of James Frey a standing ovation.

Ira Glass and Public Radio International retracted its most-listened to segment ever for Mr. Daisey’s willingness to lie to fact-checkers about things like whether he actually encountered underage workers at Foxconn (he did not) or whether a Foxconn worker with a mangled hand compared a finished iPad to “magic” (he neither worked for Foxconn, nor emoted thusly).

But that didn’t seem to deter onlookers: Read More

By Jessica Roy 3/16/12 2:50pm

Apple in Your Eye

Workers in a Chinese Apple factory. (cultofmac.com)

Everyone Got Over Their Foxconn Guilt Just in Time to Buy a New iPad

Remember that whole Apple/Foxconn debacle, wherein the New York Times questioned the human cost of the iPad’s Chinese production? Yeah, neither do we.

It turns out that the majority of Americans have succeeded in ignoring the gnawing guilt they displayed a few months ago over the whole ordeal just in time for the release of the new iPad. Congratulations, short-term Internet memory! You win again. Read More

By Foster Kamer 2/14/12 1:39pm

Funtimes at Foxconn

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Finally: Apple and Foxconn to Participate in Fair Labor Audit

Was it the segment on The Daily Show, one of the iTunes store’s bestselling TV shows? Or the eye-opening investigative report from the New York Times, prominently featured in every other Apple commercial? Or that episode of one of the most downloaded podcasts/radio shows in the country, This American Life? Or—after weeks of silence—Apple’s most famous fanboy, David Pogue, finally weighing in?

Whatever it was, Apple is now blessing and participating in the Fair Labor Association’s “unprecedented” inspection of Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer whose negligence towards human rights has been opened to the world in recent months. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 2/09/12 9:11am

Apple in Your Eye

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Apple Protest Over Conditions at Foxconn Planned for Grand Central Terminal at 10 AM Today

Consumer groups are planning to protest Apple stores this morning in the wake of The New York Times explosive investigation into working conditions at Foxconn, Apple’s primary manufacturer. We’re curious what took everyone so long, considering Wired magazine’s similarly eye-opening feature about Foxconn came out almost a year prior. (Perhaps they wanted to see whether that iPhone 4S was going to be 4G?) But regardless, blood iPhones are the new Nike sweatshops and people are thinking about the hidden costs of coveted objects again.

Leading the charge are the lobbying group SumOfUs and social activism site Change.org. As part of the effort, they’re staging a protest at 10 am today outside the gleaming crown jewel in Apple’s retail empire: its new store inside Grand Central Terminal. Read More

By Jessica Roy 1/29/12 5:20pm

Apple in Your Eye

Mr. Cramer

BSR Tries to Distance Itself from the Foxconn Scandal

The nonprofit Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, is attempting to save face following a damning report in Wednesday’s New York Times condemning working conditions in Chinese Apple factories.

The article, which practically blew up the Internet, quotes a BSR consultant who claims BSR has repeatedly warned Apple of the dangers the factories pose to workers, but that the Cupertino company has refused to make changes. “We could have saved lives, and we asked Apple to pressure Foxconn, but they wouldn’t do it,” the consultant told the Times. Read More

By Foster Kamer 1/26/12 7:04pm

Funtimes at Foxconn

The man and his muse

NYT Tech Columnist David Pogue’s Silence on Foxconn Persists, Even After the Times’s Damning Expose

On the front page of today’s New York Times is a massive umbrella piece about China’s Foxconn—who manufactures, among other things, Apple iPhones—and the sub-humane, dangerous conditions their workers assemble these products under. It is, in many ways, as astonishing as it is unsurprising, and it’s as depressing a systemic problem as they come.

So what does the Apple fan’s Apple fan—the New York Times‘s own David Pogue, the (somewhat controversial) most widely-read technology columnist in the country—have to say about Apple’s relationship to Foxconn? Especially given the front page of today’s Times, do these sorts of revelations about their manufacturing processes change the way he feels and/or writes about Apple? Read More