Take it for what you want, but Tim Culpan of Bloomberg wrote Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn? and I think he nails my main point about the whole Daisey affair with this paragraph (but please go read the whole thing, he’s been covering Foxconn for a decade or more):
The problem with Mike Daisey’s lies is that they’ve painted a picture of the Evil Empire, a place devoid of any happiness or humanity. A dark, Dickensian scene of horror and tears. They also make anyone who tries to tell a fuller, more balanced account look like an Apple or Foxconn apologist because your mind is already full of the “knowledge” of how bad it is there.
Any person who defends Mike Daisey usually comes back to some sort of “he was trying to raise awareness about a real issue”. The hard part about that is that his lies now make the job of trying to bring substantive change and have meaningful conversations that much harder.
That’s a net loss, a HUGE net loss.