♫Let's get Wisterical, 'Sterical, I wanna get Wisterical,....♫

[captainsblog]

With spring coming so early here this year, with it comes the outdoor work. Our biggest project is a major beatback of the wisteria wines which line our fence next to our neighbor Sally's (soon-to-be-former) house.  They've been encroaching since long before we moved here, and when controlled they're beautiful, but they were wayyyy up power and cable lines over in the corner of Sally's lot and were beginning to choke off some trees over here.

So for most of the past couple of hours, Eleanor went skyward with a couple of extension ladders, cutting off the vines at the source and clearing as much of the overbrush as she could from both the lines and the side of our house. I worked below, cutting back the burrowing vines, unwrapping them from hill, dale and tree, and digging out a number of the tributaries which had gone partly above and partly below ground halfway to our dining room back door.

For years, our neighbor's had an alleged landscaping service, but all they did, best as I could tell, was overmow the grass every Wednesday, doing little or nothing to control these things. And now, we're told, the daughter is canceling even that contract, so we're on our own until it sells- and then, who knows what the n00bs will do?

----

While grinding away out there, I listened to some old This American Life podcasts on my phone, so I could clear them off in time to download the next one when they post it tonight or tomorrow.

Perhaps you've heard about it.

I caught the tail end of the original local airing last night, and it's a painful handwringing by Ira Glass about their retraction of their January piece about labor abuses at Apple plants in China.  Yet it's more than just a retraction; it's a shaming and shunning of the entire original body of work.  They've scrubbed the original podcast from their archives (mirrors of it are still around, including this one), they and/or Apple may have even gone into iTunes and erased previous downloads of it (I subscribe, but never recall catching the original), and the show's home station has canceled a previously scheduled Chicago performance of the main author's reading of the monologue that they'd previously scheduled and sold tickets to, with full fanfare and an Ira-led Q&A, for early next month.

All this, because of a failure of fact-checking. The author allegedly moved some events around different places and plants, made up some quotes from his translator, and generally made the facts fit the narrative more than a piece of journalism ever should.

Yet I think the pubcaster doth protest a little too much. Granted, I was hearing the banned broadcast in full brightness of hindsight, and knew which "facts" weren't quite true. But there were still plenty of them that were; and the overall context of the piece should have raised at least some questions with both producers and listeners about just how 100 percent fact-checked the thing was.  It was a recording, with a live audience laughing and ooh-and-ahhing, of what was plainly a performance. TAL runs things like this all the time, if not as long and not as heavy; many of their shorter "acts" on lighter subjects are rebroadcasts of podcasts from a place in Manhattan called The Moth; at least one of those was previously debunked by Slate as being closer to the Moth's tradition of telling "tall tales" rather than "true stories."

And that "fact", according to the author of that piece, is one that everybody knows:

When I interviewed him, Gladwell protested that nobody who knows anything about The Moth would ever take literally a story told there.

"No one fact checks Moth stories, or expects them to stand up to skeptical scrutiny," he e-mails. His story, while based on real events, "is not supposed to be 'true,' in the sense that a story in the New York Times is supposed to be 'true.' " He continues, "It's a yarn. In this case, it's an elaborate joke: it's a send-up of the seriousness with which journalists take themselves."

Why, I wonder, is this piece, originated not from the Moth but from Papp's Public Theater, all that different? When you hear the speaker of the Apple piece, as opposed to just reading the "lies" that the guy told in support of his tale, it's a lot clearer how little he intended to be taken as a serious journalist. By his own description, he's a fat American in a Hawaiian shirt; he virtually wonders out loud what interviewee, and ultimately what media outlet, is going to buy into the crap he's pooping out?

Yet they did. If you want to hear the "seriousness with which journalists take themselves," listen to Ira's diatribe toward the end of the mea culpa piece. He's genuinely angry at the guy for misleading him. He wouldn't even do his usual end-credit joke aimed at "our boss" at WBEZ, because the whole thing's depressed him too much.

Somehow I think it has more to do with our iLove/iHate relationship with the Steve Jobs empire. For me, still, the scariest thing is not the retraction, but the rewriting of the record; that a criticized corporation can remove traces of the original criticism so quickly and effectively, making us scurry to find pirate copies of what they, ironically enough, once were willing to give to us for free.

1984? There's an app for that.™

Comments

[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

I'm going to stick with Onion News Network and Prairie Home Companion.

[floundah.livejournal.com]

"Somehow I think it has more to do with our iLove/iHate relationship with the Steve Jobs empire. For me, still, the scariest thing is not the retraction, but the rewriting of the record; that a criticized corporation can remove traces of the original criticism so quickly and effectively, making us scurry to find pirate copies of what they, ironically enough, once were willing to give to us for free.

1984? There's an app for that.™"

Yes.

[floundah.livejournal.com]

Good idea. You can also stick with anything from the Bowery Boys' podcasts ( http://theboweryboys.blogspot.com/ ), as well as anything from LaCieca's Parterre Box ( http://parterre.com/unnatural-acts-of-opera ).