Joshua Topolsky of The Verge penned an article for The Washington Post titled Why Mike Daisey had to lie to tell the truth about Apple.
Absurd? Yes.
I would recommend reading some responses from Ben Brooks and Dave Caolo because they are far more eloquent than I am about the subject.
Needless to say, I agree with both of them. The saddest part about the entire situation with Mike Daisey is that he’s now hurt more than helped things. He’s undermined his credibility (the little he might have had) and now called into question all of the problems people bring up.
With that in mind, I can only imagine that the primary goal of Mike Daisey was to make money for Mike Daisey by exploiting the workers in China. Then you have Topolsky and The Verge (along with many other publications) using Daisey’s exploitation to push up the page views to their own sites.
And then when he is defrauded, you have some (like Topolsky) trying to justify not doing due diligence and then using the whole “ends justify the means” phrase to just hand-wave it all away.
Sadly, in this case, the ends and the means both stink. That’s great.