All for One, and One for One

Once in a while, just a few minutes on the radio encapsulates some very telling features of our culture.

This morning, National Public Radio's Morning Edition carried a report about Germany's ancient tradition of apprenticeships, after first noting that youth (well, people under 25) unemployment in countries like Spain is around 50 percent while Germany has the lowest youth unemployment rate in Europe.

The successful German approach is a partnership between big businesses and labor unions that provides on-the-job and vocational training to a huge portion of the country's population. Something like 60 percent of high school graduates go into this system, rather than higher academia. They receive about a third of the pay of a starting wage for a full-time worker. The reporter interviewed a young aircraft mechanical technician, Robin Dittmar, who was working as an apprentice with Lufthansa. He splits his time between on-the-job training, actual on-the-job work on engines, and off-site vocational training. Ninety percent of apprentices complete their apprenticeships, and 50 percent of those are hired by the companies for which they apprenticed; the remainder presumably finding work with other employers in the same field or switching jobs/careers.

Right after that report, Morning Edition carried a story from Illinois about a young man who was recently named one of four Lego Master Model Builders. Like Robin Dittmar, Andrew Johnson had a long-time passion and obsession with Legos, and like the German aircraft mechanic, he is turning it into a full-time job. Unlike the German aircraft mechanic, there are only three other people who do what he does, and it's not, let's admit it, the most useful work to perform.

Let's not begrudge him his success; he's got a dream job, one that lots of people – Lego enthusiasts, at least – would love to have. But it was an illustration, certainly unintentional, of American attitudes versus at least one other country's attitudes. Americans love to hear about the one person who hit the jackpot, won the lotto, sold her dot-com for billions, won American Idol, earned $100 million in a business deal, and so on.

Germans like their high-achievers, too. There's even a German edition of American Idol. But their system itself isn't an American Idol or casino system; it's set up to try to be as useful for as many people as possible.

Now, America (or other countries) shouldn't just copy the German apprenticeship model. Shouldn't and couldn't. Germany has a situation in which its labor and business groups made lasting (and profitable) peace after World War II by agreeing to a consensus model of decision-making. There's no way that would be widely accepted in the United States, and that's not even taking into account the impending extinction of U.S. labor unions.

However, America and other nations should be considering approaches that address the needs of the majority of its population, not a casino approach with near-impossible odds but a small number of jackpot winners. It might be less razzle-dazzle, and more practical, but that's economics for you.

This Chinese Life

Or is it??

It's been a bad time for Ira Glass and his staff at the public radio program This American Life. This week, they had to publicly acknowledge that an episode of their quirky radio program was not true. Or at least not entirely true.

I won't recount the entire controversy, because it's been rehashed elsewhere ad infinitum. But, briefly, the January episode featured performance artist Mike Daisey reporting on a trip to the infamous Foxconn factories in China, where Apple products are made. He tells of meeting underage workers, an iPad factory worker who'd never seen a working iPad, armed guards outside the Foxconn factory, workers crippled by industrial pollutants, and more. But when a China-based reporter for another public radio program, Marketplace, heard the Daisey story, he knew that it sounded wrong, so he did actual reporting, and what he found was that Daisey lied, made up things that didn't happen, pretended to be in places he wasn't, tried to cover up his tracks, pretended to see things that had happened at factories (and at companies) hundreds of miles away.

There's enough reporting out there to let us know that Apple's Foxconn factories are bad places to work, so it's amazing that Daisey thought he had to fictionalize it to make it attention-grabbing. But he did, Ira Glass and his producers didn't catch it during their fact-checking, and the program aired. Now, Glass and his producers are bravely admitting the shortcomings of themselves and of Daisey.

I have to admit, I'm not a fan of This American Life, and the reason why is not unrelated to how they got themselves into this mess. I could never get past the serious, sometimes heart-wrenching stories being narrated while in the background hip music plays. The music is basically saying, "This isn't important. Life is quirky, innit?" That sound combo always struck me as the producers trying harder to be hip, rather than relying on the power of the journalism.

Well, their correspondent in this now-retracted story does not claim to be a journalist. (So why use him?) He is a performance artist. (So why use him?) His story had problems during fact-checking. (So why use it?) They went ahead with it even though they couldn't corroborate all of Daisey's claims. (So why use it?) I'm not being snarky when I say that This American Life's producers are having something of a journalistic come-to-Jesus moment as they look at what went wrong.

You can listen to the retraction episode (named, naturally, "Retraction") on the TAL website. It's a fine episode, and one that I hope is heard by every journalism student (and working journalist) in the country. Though I don't care for their program, I think Glass and his cohorts deserve serious praise for confronting the errors – theirs and Daisey's – that went into that episode. They are serious; from what I could tell from listening to "Retraction," they appear to be leaving no stone unturned and no sacred cow unexamined. In so doing, Glass & Co. are doing more than restoring their reputations; they are giving listeners an important lesson in why journalism has standards and why being right is more important than being hip.

Defunding NPR

The latest political cartoon from my stepfather, Lyle Lahey.

Mythbusters Interviewed by Moira Gunn

Last month, the hosts of TV's "Mythbusters" came to The Commonwealth Club of California to talk about their show, how they got into it, why it's interesting, and the joy of blowing things up. They were interviewed by Moira Gunn, host of public radio's "Tech Nation," who did a great job.

So, for all of you tech and science geeks, enjoy.