And that would be why the debacle seemed inevitable. By early 2011, before I ran into Mike at Macworld Expo, I thought it likely that parts of "Agony" were dramatizations of things he had seen and heard about, made larger than life. I thought it might be a good item for the , where I write a few items a week for its . I started to work on a brief article... and found myself mired again and again when I came to the details of what Mike was claiming based on what I had gleaned from show excerpts, his blog, and interviews he had given.

I did not doubt that conditions in Foxconn and other Chinese factories could be dangerous and difficult for employees. The vast majority of workers in all industries work harder every day of the week than the vast majority of workers in the United States and other developed nations. That is a fact we must all confront, and which has been highlighted more in the last two years than the last two decades. It is not an Apple-specific problem, nor one specific to foreign companies doing business in China.

But Daisey could not have gathered the amount of information he alleged he did for the show in a week in China. Daisey describes himself, of one performance of the show hosted on his site, "And at the end of the day, I am large, I am American, and I am wearing a f------ Hawaiian shirt." Daisey claims to have walked in with a translator to Foxconn and other plants and to have talked to dozens of workers.

I thought he might have pulled it off. He's compelling. He tells a good story. But the sheer variety of stories he collected made it impossible. In the transcript, Daisey says that some of the very first workers he met admitted to the translator that they were young teenagers--prohibited under Chinese law from being factory workers and against Apple's supplier guidelines. In the same few days, he meets a fellow with a mangled hand, workers poisoned by n-hexane, and observes other violations and injuries. It was just too much. Ira Glass says that Mike Daisey admitted to him that the stories were second-hand, that he never met with the quantity of people he says he did--nor most of the folks he talks about. (Glass speculates that he didn't meet with any of them.)

Long-form non-fiction, the stuff that the , , and specialize in, requires enormous amounts of time to gain the trust of people, gather information, put the pieces together. A single visit and random encounters aren't enough. Daisey's translator says , and Daisey confirmed specific incidents were fabricated to Ira Glass.