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Apple off the hook: Haven’t we seen this before?

The drama playing out with Apple’s working conditions and a report on same feels very familiar. To recap, Apple has been under fire for some time for the unethical and dangerous working conditions in their over seas factories, particularly in Asia. A writer and off-Broadway performer posted a story about Apple’s practices and then had to retract it when it turned out some of the details were embellished. And now …

… And now many in the media will feel they can’t report much on the Apple work-conditions story, even if they uncover a sizzler of a scoop, because one dumb ass made some shit up or was taken in by false info. It’s a situation that works out, quite conveniently, for the subject under scrutiny. And that sure sounded familiar …

Ahh yes, 2004, the national guard story. Someone intentionally or unintentionally passed on some false info about what was potentially a true story to CBS news, and once it broke that that info was false, the whole story was verboten. Much to the relief of the Bush reelection campaign.

I’m not saying here that Apple engineered this in some kind of super-duper Bene Gesserit reverse media mind fuck, or that it’s as big a deal as the national guard story, only that it provides cover for Apple. And that’s unfortunate.

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Comments

  2. leftwingfox says

    Is this to insinuate that Apple needs cover?

    This didn’t come out of nowhere. There were issues with Foxconn long before the TAL story (such as the multiple worker suicides).

    I’m a long-time Apple user, but yeah, Bush’s record at the National Guard was the first thing to pop into my mind too. The stories I’ve read so far only imply that he made everything up, while not touching on whether he based his composite characters off of existing reports by factory workers.

    So worker “A” may have been burnt, worker “B” poisoned. Artist creates character “AB” who was burnt and poisoned based on those reports. TAL reports it as if the artist actually talked to AB. TAL then pulls the story because “AB” didn’t exist, thus FoxConn pretends no-one was ever burnt or poisoned.

  3. RW Ahrens says

    Yes, and subsequent reports have showed that seems that Foxconn started, a few years ago, paying a kind of payment to families of those who had suicided. After that, their suicide rate skyrocketed, sparking the reports. It seems that a number of folks got jobs there with the intention of getting that payment for their families. Once they stopped the payments, their suicide rate dropped to past lower rates.

    But go back and read about it – Mike Daisey admits that he interviewed nobody. So he didn’t make the kinds of exposures you imagine at all. He just made the whole thing up, as the translator he used later admitted to another reporter, and as he has already admitted.

    I am sure that the conditions at Foxconn were, at first, rather poor by US standards, when Apple began using that company. But Apple has had a longtime policy of asking suppliers to live up to certain labor standards – don’t forget that Apple, and Jobs, are very liberal, and definitely support good labor practices. It has taken a few years for the situation to improve – and it has – at Apple’s insistence.

    But “This American Life” reported Daisey’s Chinese interpreter disputed many of the artist’s claims when contacted by Rob Schmitz, a China correspondent for the public radio show “Marketplace.” Among them, the translator said guards outside the factory weren’t armed, Daisey never met workers from a secret union and he never visited factory dorm rooms.
    Daisey told Glass he didn’t meet any poisoned workers and guessed at the ages of some he met. He also said some details he used were things he read about happening elsewhere.
    “I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” he told Glass. “But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”

    emphasis mine.

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-firestorm-leads-artist-change-213015258.html

    Hmm, yeah, “guessed at the ages”. As if Westerners are SOOO good at guessing the ages of Asians.

    So the whole thing was theater. Concocted for selling tickets. Using Apple’s name, because he knew it would sell lots more tickets if it was sensational. Total, unmitigated bullshit.

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