miguelmacias asked: Mr. Rosen: Listening TAL's retraction episode I had the increasing feeling that this was a big show to exonerate This American Life and vilify a person who after all, is not responsible for the fact that This American Life did not do its due diligence when conducting the fact checking for this story. Do you think that all the praise directed at TAL for their handling of this situation can result in them not being held accountable for the simple fact that they messed up?

We retract that episode. We apologize to our listeners. By not trying to contact the translator, we screwed up. We should have killed the story. It should never have aired.

How much more accountability do you want? (Background.)

I don’t think the emphasis on Daisey’s lies is misplaced. I don’t think This American Life is evading accountability. However, there is one way in which I lean in your direction.

This American Life is about stories. No word is more basic to the show than that… “story.” You could almost say that the show fetishizes the “story” as object. I think Ira Glass could have dug a little deeper into why he and his team made that fatal error and broadcast the segment even though they could not fully check it with the translator. They could have adopted as a working hypothesis that such an error was years in the making, not an isolated slip-up but something that cut deeper. If they had done that, they might have begun to question whether it is possible to fall too deeply in love with “stories” and their magical effects; whether that kind of love erodes skepticism, even when you are telling yourself to be skeptical; whether Ira and his colleagues in some way wanted Daisey’s stories to be 100 percent true, whether this wish interfered with their judgment, whether there isn’t something just a little too cultish about the cult of “the story” on This American Life.

They did not go there. But they could have. And maybe they should have.

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