Tuesday, May 01, 2012

NATO vs. Rogues? - IPS:

The controversy over Mike Daisey’s one-man performance highlighting the abuses of workers at Apple subcontractors in China continues to rage in blogs and the media world. FPIF columnist Hannah Gurman weighs in this week with her own recommendation: focus on what Daisey got right.

“Journalistic accountability is indeed important,” she writes in True Lies about Apple and Foxconn. “However, at a certain point, scrutinizing Daisey’s practice becomes myopic and even absurd. By all accounts, virtually everything Daisey said was true insofar as the things he described do actually occur in factories all over China. By focusing on narrow rules of journalistic accountability, this controversy seemed to lose sight of these larger truths. Questions about Daisey’s accountability threatened to displace the larger issues of corporate accountability, creating a gigantic loophole through which Apple/Foxconn might easily escape.”