I'd see this show only if it was performed by Jayson Blair.

I honestly don't know if I could go out and pay money to see this guy again. I think the entire time I would have to stifle the impulse to shout "liar!" anytime he told something that was meant to sound anecdotal or matter-of-fact. I'd probably ruin the show for myself and anyone who went with me with all the eye rolling I'd be doing. He should collaborate or work with some other people. He needs to build his cred up as an artists again not as a solo performer.

I'd prefer he wind his way back to this subject matter at least a few years from now, after a few totally unrelated projects rehabilitate his credibility and throw a little more light on exactly what he expects viewers to take from their experience of his projects.

From this project and Agony, it sure seemed like he was building a virtually political case for desired societal change.

That's wonderful and all, but unless you're just preaching to the choir*, you need to have rock-solid credibility to achieve that end. You can't get there JUST by being a great storyteller.

With all of that said, I have to say I kind of like the bold move, I'm more than a little interested to see how he pivots from the scandal, and if it's going to be in the background of anything he did next anyway, why not foreground it?

* Always a question mark when one's preferred medium is as precious as first-person storytelling to the NPR-tote-bag set, though it should be noted that this set really, really prizes the appearance of authenticity and really, really despises the appearance of hypocrisy, so he has his work cut out for him.

That's some relativist bullshit. Instead of accepting his comeuppance, Daisey is trying to mitigate his own disgrace by claiming that the real problem is "the myth of objective journalism." Puhleeze! Daisey continues to mar his credibility with garbage like this.

Objective truth does exist. Otherwise, Daisey would not have gotten himself and TAL in trouble.

It would be difficult to exaggerate how little I care about Mike Daisey at this point.

"That's some relativist bullshit. Instead of accepting his comeuppance, Daisey is trying to mitigate his own disgrace by claiming that the real problem is "the myth of objective journalism." Puhleeze! Daisey continues to mar his credibility with garbage like this."

Well, to be clear—this isn't an apology. That was made, very sincerely and publicly, over a year ago. You can read it here:

http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/2012/03/som…

I then spent six months revising the work to be ethically made, performing that work in many cities while directly facing and openly acknowledging where I had previously fallen short, and gave the work away under an open license so that anyone, anywhere can perform it and modify it as they see fit.

So while the evening will be about the problems that the myth of objective journalism poses, that isn't the same as claiming that this is "the real problem". I have fully owned what I've done for a long time now. This is a piece about journalism from someone with an unusual vantage point on it, whose whole career is made up of commenting from outside of things. And I've just spent a year obsessed by this topic, while also taking a course at NYU's graduate school for journalism. You can read about that here if you wish:

http://crosscut.com/2013/05/06/theatre/114…

If Allison really can't decide if she has forgiven me, and assuming she's followed what I've been doing over the last year or so, I'd suggest that the verdict is in, and she hasn't. And if she doesn't know if she wants to hear me talk about journalism, maybe the answer is that she doesn't, and she can elect to stay home.

Her name is Alison.

I don't know anything about this guy, but there are a lot of very talented people (writers and performers, living and dead) on this planet, and it seems to me that it's much easier to go find something else to do/read/watch that's more rewarding than to bang your head hoping to enjoy someone you object to in principle. Think of it as a relationship.

(And anyway, his comment makes him sound a little self-absorbed.)

I think he's an amazing performer. He's also someone who is intellectually curious and continually finding new and interesting topics. Alison, I hope you will take the time to have a conversation with him. I would certainly like to read about it if you do.

@MD You're correct that you can both be sorry for lying to your audience and produce this monologue on journalism without being insincere about either.

Yet having read your apology and then the essay by Kugiya, you do seem to be genuinely remorseful about misleading your audience, but continue to portray yourself as a victim of the capricious standards of objective journalism. This quote from the Kugiya essay lead me to believe this:
“'Journalism is this incredibly hard act. You’re using imperfect tools, in an imperfect world, using words filled with bias to tell the truth, and we pretend there’s a story that has two sides and only two sides.'”

I don't think you completely owned up to everything you did wrong regarding the Agony/Ecstasy monologue and the TAL piece. You seem to believe that if what your piece was labeled as something other than journalism--"activist theater," for instance, it would have been acceptable because people then would not have expect everything in it to be true.

Moreover, this new monologue does seem to be a tacit apologia: see, what I did wasn't so unusual for a piece of journalism. I, Mike Daisey, erred and fell below the standards of what objective journalism would usually require, but every journalist is guilty of this to some extent.

It going to take more than disclaimers and an "ethically made" monologues about "the myth of objective journalism" to regain the trust you lost from a portion of your audience.

The quote you just quoted is about how vital and difficult I think journalism is. I'm not a journalist. I wasn't speaking about my work—I was talking about journalists, whose field is journalism. It has fuck all to do with my scandal.

"It going to take more than disclaimers and an "ethically made" monologues about "the myth of objective journalism" to regain the trust you lost from a portion of your audience."

I am not interested in "regaining trust". I'm interested in making my work. If people don't want to participate in that, they can not come to the theater or listen to my work online.

@MD I agree with both your points: 1) You are not a journalist and 2) We don't have to support your "work"

See? We found common ground. It's not so hard.

Hooray!

Way to go, Mike! There's no surer way to sway those who suspect you're a narcissist with judgment problems than to seek out alt-weekly blog posts and try to correct the perceptions of internet commenters.

My mind sure has changed. Thanks Mike Daisy!

Everyone has biases and filters that effect how they receive information and also how they present it to others. In that respect, one can say that objective journalism is indeed a myth in much that same way that humans are incapable of grasping reality as a thing in and of itself. We must rely upon our senses and preexisting biases, and that inevitably changes how we see and process thing. That's all very wanky and Philosophy 101, though. In a practical sense journalism does need to strive to be fair.

Good journalists are self-reflective, cognizant of their own filters, and get conclusions from data, not the other way around. A good journalists shouldn't start with an agenda and look for things to confirm their beliefs- they should explore their subject and then have their beliefs rise out of that. They shouldn't believe things because they want to, they should believe things because of what they've seen and heard and learned. On top of that, as much as it's necessary to tell a good story, a good journalist doesn't sacrifice accuracy for the sake of narrative. Both accuracy and narrative are important, but accuracy is probably a little more important that being entertaining. In the battle between the two, facts win.

Is all that stuff difficult? Oh yeah. Are there people who say "fuck it" and just take the easy way out? All the time. Do otherwise good journalist slip up? You bet. But we have a general outline of what it means to be a skilled reporter. We know what the road entails, what the direction is. Mike Daisey decided to walk the other way.

I agree with everything the Reverend had to say. I'm specifically interested in how very American ideas about objectivity, born in the era of broadcast journalism and Edward R. Murrow and the creation of the anchor, effect how stories in the news are told, and what effect that has on our discourse. There's other stuff, but that's some of it I suspect.

"Way to go, Mike! There's no surer way to sway those who suspect you're a narcissist with judgment problems than to seek out alt-weekly blog posts and try to correct the perceptions of internet commenters."

I'm just going to address head-on how fucking lame this is. If one never engages with people, then you're an object and a plaything for the whim of anonymous people on the internet. But if you genuinely engage and openly discuss what you do with those people, and give them the benefit of the doubt, you get this kind of shit argument—which basically says, "Nyah nyah—you're so lame, you even would stoop to talk to us!"

I spoke up because I had a little time, the show is new, and every few months hope springs eternal that it would be worth engaging. It was actually precisely the same *before* the scandal, too. I think it's sad.

You're not engaging with shit. For an artist, you don't seem to have a great grasp of how different mediums work, so let me help you with that:

THIS is a medium where consumptive pedants fuck off during their work day. The people you are trying to engage with are here commenting or reading this post's comments because these days, hearing your name is almost like a dog whistle begging for the airing of the negative opinion they already hold.

In short, you can't win here, and you ought to be savvy enough by now to know that. All you can do is avoid losing. If you avoid losing, it's not news. If you lose, it's "Crazy Mike Daisey spends his days bickering with internet commenters."

Since you must know that to some degree, it just makes you look unbelievably self-involved and desperate when you proceed anyway.

If you want to engage in a meaningful way, you should do it on your home turf, i.e. ART. You'll say, "I shouldn't be limited to one forum for engagement," and I'll say, "you can do whatever you want, but you can't also expect to be effective."

Speak for yourself, Colin, I'm not consumptive, just dysenterysted.

Only C.C. could fault Daisey for actually engaging his detractors. Why does anyone comment on Blogtown if not to bait people into arguing with them about the minutiae of pointless topics? (Unless you're Todd, and you comment just to prove that you still exist.)

There are so many, many, many things to disagree with M.D on, but defending himself on the Internet isn't one of them.

God strike me down the day I set up a Google Alert for my own name.