The philosophy that animates Ira Glass’s This American Life can be summed up by a simple come on: “Let me tell you a story.” News, almost by definition, rarely conforms to what Aristotle deemed the essential element of storytelling: plot. It consists of dispatches from geographically disparate locales and varying worlds (politics, foreign affairs, finance, sports), and it doesn’t adhere to a scenario.

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Of late, the proliferation of offerings from online outlets has increased choices while fragmenting audiences, creating an age of hot takes and short attention spans. It’s hard to get consumers of TV and radio news to stay tuned. “Having a plot is a way to make people stick around and provide something that feels satisfying,” Ira Glass noted. “That’s the thing about it that’s helpful. If you have a plot, the story can be mundane. It can be incredibly everyday. But people just want to find out what’s gonna happen, and they’ll hang around.”

Not only this, but plot—or narrative, as its sometimes more grandly called—offers an antidote to the political and cultural polarization changing audience habits. As Glass put it: “The primary problem you have in doing a story about any of the big, emotional issues of our time—was the election stolen, does the vaccine work, what to think of Donald Trump, climate change—is that everybody already knows what they think. If you start any story, everybody’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’ There’s an enormous hurdle to get over to get people to listen past even the first thirty-five seconds. What do you do? By having characters, scenes, and surprising moments and just letting the thing unfold, you can catch people up in the lives of the people you’re documenting. And then they’ll keep listening to hear how things work out.”

The apotheosis of the This American Life approach is its November 15, 2019, episode, “The Out Crowd,” winner of the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for audio journalism. When the staff of TAL began to put together this show, which focuses on how the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy affected asylum seekers trying to cross into the United States, the basic facts of the matter were already familiar. “We knew this had gotten coverage in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and on the networks,” recalled Glass. “It’s out there—if you follow this. But all of the stories felt academic.” The goal was to capture the human dimensions of a policy that had stranded thousands in desolate shelters deemed unsafe by the US State Department.

“The Out Crowd” opens with a fourteen-minute prologue reported from a tent city in Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. In it, Glass introduces listeners to an unlikely protagonist—a nine-year-old Honduran refugee named Darwin who along with his mother is hoping to get to America. “I feel like if you said at the beginning that this was a show about immigration, nobody would listen,” said Glass. “The fact that the first few minutes of the show can just be a portrait of this completely charming kid, everybody’s favorite kid—you wanna hear more. Then you pull the camera back. Then you reveal: OK. Here’s what the show is about today.”

Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire.

The show is about the difficulties facing people like Darwin and his family. Some of these difficulties arose from Trump’s policies. As outlined by the Los Angeles Times reporter Molly O’Toole (TAL partnered with the newspaper on this episode), the United States was not just building a physical wall at its southern border but also a bureaucratic one. “We’ve been asked to do affirmative harm to people,” one asylum officer says in explaining rules that send even qualified migrants back to the dangers they are fleeing.

Meanwhile refugees faced a more imminent peril: as they awaited a resolution to their cases, cartel members bent on kidnapping them for ransom lurked just beyond their camp gates. To illustrate this part of the tale, Glass introduced Emily Green, a reporter for Vice, who’d latched onto some terrifying audiotape—cell phone recordings of negotiations between cartel members and the American sister of a Honduran businessman abducted near his border camp. The hostage was ultimately freed, but the exchanges spoke to why some migrants, among them Darwin’s mother, might choose what to most people would be an unthinkable option: sending her son on alone to the United States.

“She doesn’t want to let him go,” Glass concludes, “but given how things play out, she’s not sure what else to do.”

In the spring of 2020, when the Pulitzer committee presented its award to This American Life, it amounted not just to a recognition of “The Out Crowd” but of Glass’s philosophy. The prize saluted what the Pulitzer committee termed the value of “revelatory, intimate journalism.” As Glass sees it, work like “The Out Crowd,” unlike that of journalists who maintain traditional reportorial distance, does something rare. It encourages audiences to feel.

“A lot of so-called conventional sorts of reporting that aren’t built around narrative can end up treating people in sort of an anthropological way,” he said. “The reporters are just outside anthropologists who are coming in to diagnose questions like, ‘Have people been hurt by the economy?’ Their reporting doesn’t include the possibility of relating to the people. I think the fundamental advantage of narrative is that you can create a context where it’s possible to imagine being someone different from yourself.”

Over the years, This American Life has applied the technique to countless important subjects. In “The Giant Pool of Money,” an episode that aired in 2008, reporter Adam Davidson and producer Alex Blumberg make the financial crisis sparked by the collapse of the mortgage bubble comprehensible to just about anyone. In “The Night in Question” in 2015, reporter Dan Ephron and producer Nancy Updike unravel the previously inexplicable motives behind the assassination of Israeli prime minister Itzak Rabin.

The method also works for subjects that on the surface seem less profound. In “129 Cars,” a 2013 episode produced by Glass and Robyn Semien and reported by, among others, Sarah Koenig and Brian Reed (the mind behind S Town), TAL explores the lengths to which the staff of Town and Country Jeep Chrysler Ram in Levittown, New York, goes to hit its monthly sales quotas. (To get psyched, one salesman reads Sun Tzu’s The Art of War at his desk.) In “#1 Party School,” TAL examines the party-till-you puke ethos of students at Pennsylvania State University while annotating the psychological damage they inflict on themselves and the property damage they do to the town of State College.

“There is nothing in the journalism playbook to prevent a determined liar from getting one over now and again. It is partly because seekers of the truth expect the same in others.”

Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire. The nadir of the TAL approach is its January 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” When it first aired, this show appeared to be yet another example of Glass’s artistry. A reworking of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stage production by the monologist Mike Daisey that had been selling out theaters around the country, the program investigates how Americans, in their zeal for iPhones and iPads, have ignored the inconvenient truth that these sleek implements are largely manufactured by workers toiling in brutal conditions at the massive Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China.

Daisey, with the assistance of an interpreter named Cathy who becomes a major character in the story, had recently toured the facility, and he assured Glass of the accuracy of his descriptions of the brutal working environment. After vetting the basic facts about Apple’s production process, TAL aired his allegations.

“Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” opens with the arrival of Daisey and Cathy at Foxconn. It’s the kind of simple, arresting scene typical of This American Life:

I get out of the taxi with my translator, and the first thing I see at the gates are the guards. And the guards look pissed. They look really pissed, and they are carrying guns.

More worrying than the guns is what Daisey describes next—the makeup of the labor force:

In my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were fourteen years old, thirteen years old, twelve. Do you really think that Apple doesn’t know?

Everywhere Daisey looked, he claimed to have seen evidence of corporate disregard for worker welfare. Some laborers shake from exposure to n-hexane, a toxic chemical used to clean the screens of Apple devices. An elderly ex-worker proffers a hand mangled, Daisey says, during the manufacturing of an iPad case. Because there are few iPads in China, Daisey shows the worker his. The man’s eyes light up. According to Daisey, he told Cathy: “It’s a kind of magic.”

“Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication.

Glass might never have learned that he’d been bamboozled had not Rob Schmitz, at the time a reporter for Marketplace in Shanghai, listened to “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” and realized that key parts of it (Chinese private security guards are prohibited by law from carrying firearms) are untrue. At the suggestion of an executive at American Public Media, the then-distributor of both Marketplace and TAL, Schmitz called Glass, and Glass engaged him to investigate the entire broadcast.

Glass starts the March 16, 2012, This American Life, titled “Retraction,” by apologizing for airing “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The fault, he says, is not so much in Daisey as in himself. He didn’t press the monologist regarding a vital piece of intelligence—contact information for Cathy. “He had a cell phone number for her, but it didn’t work anymore. He said he had no way to reach her. Because other things Mike told us about Apple and Foxconn seemed to check out, we saw no reason to doubt him, and we dropped this. That was a mistake.”

“Times changed, and I became less interested in doing memoir, because memoir is sort of everywhere. Basically, the internet happened.”

Just how big a mistake becomes plain when Glass cues up act one: Rob Schmitz’s probe of Daisey’s story. “I decided to track down his translator,” the Marketplace reporter begins. “I could pretend finding her took amazing detective work. But basically, I just typed ‘Cathy and translator and Shenzhen’ into Google. I called the first number that came up.” Cathy answered. Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true.”

Schmitz’s deconstruction of Daisey’s piece (he uncovered at least thirteen lies) remains one of the most unsettling segments ever broadcast on This American Life. No sooner did it conclude than Glass introduced an even more harrowing segment—an interview with Mike Daisey, who expresses only one grudging regret: he is sorry he permitted a program dedicated to journalism to air a piece written for the stage.

Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve.

As far as Daisey is concerned, the issue was one of inaccurate labeling. Glass didn’t buy it.

I understand you believe this, but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people go to see a person talk. People take it as literal truth. I thought the story was true.

For all that, the host seems less outraged than hurt.

I have such a weird mix of feelings about this, because I simultaneously feel terrible for you. And also, I feel lied to. And also, I stuck my neck out for you . . . I vouched for you. With our audience, based on your word.

For This American Life, Daisey-gate was a mortifying embarrassment. At first, a majority of critics went easy on the program. Seventeen years into its run, it had built a lot of goodwill. David Carr of the New York Times saw Ira Glass as the victim: “There is nothing in the journalism playbook to prevent a determined liar from getting one over now and again. It is partly because seekers of the truth expect the same in others.” James Fallows of The Atlantic praised Glass’s retraction, terming it “a superb unraveling of Daisey’s inventions” and an “exploration of real journalistic values and the difference between fact and metaphor.” Soon enough, the criticism hardened.

Some felt that the host’s mea culpa was pat. Responding to his comment about having “a weird mix of feelings” concerning Daisey’s deceits, David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun wrote, “Despite all the feelings, whoa, whoa, whoa feelings, feeling bad after the crime isn’t enough. Talking about your feelings and beating up the lying liar the way Glass did without offering specific actions is more performance and self-absorption than it is genuine contrition.”

More substantially, a few attacked the central idea of This American Life—narrative journalism. In an essay for The Baffler, Eugenia Williamson wrote, “Daisey exposed the fact that the aesthetics and conventions of the narrative journey Glass has patented . . . were never designed to accommodate harsh . . . truths . . . Daisey’s lies . . . exposed the limitations of This American Life’s twee, transporting narratives, the show’s habit of massaging painful realities into puddles of personal experience, its preference for pathos over tragedy.”

In the end, This American Life survived Mike Daisey. “Immediately after that we started working with professional fact-checkers,” said Glass. Also, the Daisey scam occurred as TAL was phasing out what had long been a staple—monologues by people like Daisey. In its early years the program had often featured works by the comically arch Sarah Vowell and the adventurous Scott Carrier. Later the lineup regularly included the twistedly fatalistic David Rakoff, the twistedly sweet David Sedaris, and the twistedly awkward Mike Birbiglia.

But by midway into the millennium’s second decade, Glass had decided that the genre was overexposed. “Times changed, and I became less interested in doing memoir, because memoir is sort of everywhere. Basically, the internet happened. People documenting their own lives on social media happened after that. The idea of, ‘Let’s document people’s everyday lives’ became less interesting.”

As for the larger issue of narrative journalism, not only was Glass not deterred by the harsh assessments of “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” but he upped his bet on the form. “When I talk to journalism students they sometimes freak out when I say, ‘You’re gonna do a story with a plot.’ But all a plot means is: This happened. Then this next thing happened. And that caused this next thing to happen. That will be the thing that’s the spine. Then we can digress from there to talk about feelings and make jokes and describe things and have ideas about the world. But the fundamental thing will be: Here’s Point A. Here’s Point B. Here’s Point C. And that’s a powerful force. That’s part of what gives it such satisfaction at the end.”

This is the electronic media movement that Glass started, the one that is attracting not just mainstream journalism outfits like the New York Times and giving birth to podcasting pioneers—among them former TAL producer Alex Blumberg—but inspiring all those young imitators with iPhones and websites who, in the ultimate tribute to Glass, believe they do a better job than he does.

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From ON AIR: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR by Steve Oney. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.