My takeaway from the TAL email is that the conditions he describes are true the most part, with the exception of underage workers being common. This doesn't match the media coverage at all -- I suppose we'll all find out when they release the full episode. The impression I get from these parts:
>"In our original broadcast, we fact checked all the things that Daisey said about Apple's operations in China," says Glass, "and those parts of his story were true, except for the underage workers, who are rare."
>Some of the falsehoods found in Daisey's monologue are small ones: the number of factories Daisey visited in China, for instance, and the number of workers he spoke with. Others are large. In his monologue he claims to have met a group of workers who were poisoned on an iPhone assembly line by a chemical called n-hexane. Apple's audits of its suppliers show that an incident like this occurred in a factory in China, but the factory wasn’t located in Shenzhen, where Daisey visited.
>"It happened nearly a thousand miles away, in a city called Suzhou," Marketplace’s Schmitz says in his report. "I’ve interviewed these workers, so I knew the story. And when I heard Daisey’s monologue on the radio, I wondered: How’d they get all the way down to Shenzhen? It seemed crazy, that somehow Daisey could’ve met a few of them during his trip."
But he mushed them all together into a narrative and framed it as if he has personally seen and talked with these people.
Skimming the mainstream coverage I get the impression that both his personal story and the facts about the manufacturing culture were equally wrong. So he did the cause was fighting for vastly more harm than good: people now believe the problem itself doesn't exist. Whoops. Way to go dude.
I'll be interested to hear the correction episode to see how they detangle the falsehoods in the author's personal story vs things that aren't happening (or aren't happening with enough frequency to be concerned about.)
Certainly suggesting that a westerner with a single week in China would encounter all these problems exaggerates their frequency even if the problems are real. It suggests that if he can find all this out so easily, what else must be going on? On the other hand, many of his claims about conditions so seem to be real issues backed by other reporting. It will be a tricky episode.
edit: lol, lowest rated comment out of hundreds. my judgement must be out of whack, i'll take another look at this story tomorrow with a clear head.