Public Radio Caught Fabricated Entire Investigative Report

During the budget wrestling last year, one item the Republican wanted to cut was the public radio. The administrated resisted, and valued the irreplaceable role of a government controlled public radio network. succeeded in keeping this government sponsored propaganda venue. Yesterday WBEZ, a Chicago based public radio station, was caught fabricated entire contents of an investigative news report regarding factory conditions in China.

The show, Mike Daisey's Story about Visiting Foxconn, was commissioned by public radio producer Ira Glass.

Through its 'This American Life' show, a program distributed through PRI, Public Radio depicted a horrified working condition of factory workers in China with a shortened version on January 6, 2012.

After the preview, although the station was alerted that the report was fabricated, the local correspondent cited 'Cathy' was not in existence, the public radio still went ahead to air the entire one hour show with the fake stories, but packaged it as a news item on March 16, 2012.

The faked story was a hit to become 'the single most popular podcast in the program's history. It amounts 888,000 downloads and 206,000 streams and widely cited as the utmost reality of factory conditions in China. Across America and in the world, numerous campaigns used the non-fiction report as a motivation to block Made-in-China products.

After the public radio was caught fabricating stories and then packaging it as a non-fiction investigative news item, Mike Daisey stated on his person blog that he 'stand by' his work, which uses a 'dramatic license'.

Apple: too Far to Turn Back Now

This morning Rush Limbaugh lamented the reason Apple couldn't move their iPhone assembly line back to the US was because of, what else, the Union. The topic was brought up by a leak of discussions last February at White House between Steve Jobs and President Obama. Basically, Apple told Obama there was no way to bring Apple's assembly line back. It's not a pure cost consideration, but rather based on the skills and management of the work force.

An ex-senior executive of Apple recalled the conversation and told the New York Times reporter that "the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts"; or in plain English, American workers were so under-educated, under-trained, with limited cognitive capacity.

He might as well say American workers were pigs. Had Obama realized that was not a joke, he would be on the right track to prepare the American workers for jobs.

The Chairman of Apple's main contracting company Foxconn recently revealed his secret in leading such a formidable workforce that are flexible, skillful and hardworking: to treat them as pigs. Terry Gou stated at a year-end party that his mentor would be the Director Chin Shih-chien of the Taipei Zoo in this regarding. As a matter of fact, he is tripling the wisdom down by inviting Mr. Chin to give a lecture to the company's mid-level managers to share his experience managing zoo animals.

Where IPad is Built

Should you care where your shiny iPad was built?

Wired Magazine's cover story was the string of worker suicides in an Taiwan company's plants in the Mainland. A dozen of Foxconn workers jumped over buildings in a year. The author questioned US consumers' sense of guilty and implied they should boycott the iPhone, iPad, etc. to help those poor workers in slave camps.

That judgment could only came from a disconnected ignorance and unfounded entitlement of supremacy. Foxconn, with its one million workers, is not a small town sweat factory. One dozen suicides in city with one million population in a year is a tragedy, but not as news worthy. To put it into context, No. 12 largest city in the US, San Francisco has a population of 0.8 million, and No. 8 Dallas, TX 1.3 million. The majority workers in Foxconn plants came from rural areas, probably had never taken a train before. Placing people in modern industry with inherited high pressure from the production line comes with inevitable risk.

Revenge of the iPods City

The Mail on Sunday articles 'iPod City' on June 11, 2006 and 'The iPod's Incredible Journey' on June 15, 2006 portrayed an unbelievable chilling working condition where iPods were made in a mainland China company run by Taiwan based Foxconn.

Apply launched an investigation, and subsequently found 'no problem' based on it's suppliers' code of conduct.

On June 15, 2006, a Chinese Business News (CBN) article detailed violations of Chinese labor laws in the Hon Hai Precision Industry's Foxconn plant.

On August 18, 2006, Apple found the plant violated it's code of conduct.

Even though the Taiwan-based Foxconn admitted labor law violations, it went on to take the two Chinese journalists, editor Wong Bao and reporter Wang You, to the court, asking 30 million RMB Yuan. As a procedure of the civil lawsuit filed at the Shenzhen Middle People's Court, Foxconn had the court freeze personal properties of the two journalists.

The whole case was bazaar in the sense that CBN was not the news agency originally broke out the story (which was the British media), nor is it the only Chinese media ran report on the overtime work situation at Foxconn. It was targeted anyway. Even more, Chinese law protected journalist from legal retaliation by only allowing the news agency, not the individual to be sued (article 6 of the Supreme Court's 'Opinion on defamation cases' in 1993), but the journalists was sued as individual anyway in this case.

The Hon Hai Precision ranked 206 in this years Forbes 500. Foxconn has partnership with Apple, Motorola, Nokia, IBM and Sony, etc.