I think James Poniewozik is largely correct that while the networks may be upset about new technologies that let viewers skip ads, they might be better off trying to find fee structures that are responsive to new technologies:

But they want—and a good business would provide—many more ways of paying, if not with their eyeball attention to ads, then with money. (There’s the possibility, for instance, that networks could raise fees to networks like Dish that offer ad-zappers, which fees could be passed along to those who ad-zap, to replace lost ad revenue.) People want to be able to buy episodes, subscribe to shows, watch on their own schedule, and bypass ads they don’t want. In the process, the relationship of people to TV networks will change: right now, networks’ true “customers” are the advertisers, because they’re the ones who pay money.

The TV business is changing from one with a single main revenue source to one with a lot of them; the transition is bound to be painful for the networks. But quashing an option your consumers want is the wrong way to forestall that pain. You can’t pull the plug on technology forever, and if that’s your best response to change, it’s your own fault when consumers start tuning you out.

I also think this is easier in theory than in practice, and is going to take years to sort out. One important experiment will be to see how consumers respond to a Netflix or Hulu Plus pricing scheme that’s more reflective of the actual cost of supporting that content and the production of higher-quality original content. A second step will be to see how consumers behave if they’re faced with regular but reasonable hikes in the prices of those services, which are responsive to both renegotiated content contracts and rising wages and costs. I would like for it to be true that people are willing to pay for content at a cost that will support a fairly diverse array of high-quality programming, but as I’ve written before, we don’t actually have proof of a viable financial model yet, and it’s not wrong for the networks to be cautious about blowing up an existing business model in favor of optimistic projections.

We have a sense of what we’ll pay for three distinct products in this market. First, there’s what people will pay for bundled cable, both in terms of what prices will get them in the door and what prices won’t lead them to quit at the end of a first-year contract. We also have a sense of what we’ll pay for a single episode of television, because iTunes and Amazon have established that price for consumers much in the way cable companies did. And we know we’ll pay $8-$30 a month for streaming video and DVD exchange services. As consumers, I think we have little sense of the ad revenue we’d have to make up if we were to replace advertisers as networks’ customers. I’d be excited to see a good experiment in how to price out new models, but it would take serious negotiation between distributors and the networks to set one up, and it would need to include both coastal and rural consumers to account for differences in broadband penetration and avoid preference bias. If folks have ideas on how to make such an experiment work, leave them in comments. It’s time to start thinking beyond the simple idea that evolution is good and important, and start talking in greater detail about how we get there.

The bridge is yours.

-I would totally watch a block of shows about middle-aged comedians.

-Why the 21 Jump Street adaptation worked.

-How Playboy pitched itself to advertisers back in the day.

-It’s possible to condemn Mike Daisey’s lies and believe that Apple—and all electronics and consumer goods companies—can do better.

-How does a robot become a real boy?

Reading through the transcript of this weekend’s episode of This American Life, in which Ira Glass explores how the program came to air an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, despite clear warnings that numerous elements and anecdotes in it were fabricated for dramatic effect is a striking thing. It’s not just that Daisey’s actions will likely harm the larger—and still just—cause of pushing Apple to improve working conditions throughout its supply chain, or that a venerable program let itself be tripped up by the desire for a good story. It’s more that it’s a clear articulation of a troubling worldview that’s been awfully present in campaigns from this one, to Stop Kony, and that’s penetrating even the academy itself: that in telling moving stories, emotional experiences may be more important than precision.

” I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” Daisey told Glass. “But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes—has made—other people delve.”

But of course, it didn’t really take Daisey’s monologue to make people delve. Daisey himself says on the program that “I wanted to have the voice of this thing that had been happening that everyone been talking about,” which suggests a desire more to capitalize on a rising wave of conversation to instigate it. And the New York Times reporting by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza has certainly succeeded in getting people talking and thinking critically about Apple and its supply chain without a whit of fictionalization for dramatic effect. It’s odd that Daisey wouldn’t trust the facts when the facts have proven to be so compelling time and time again.

The same is true for the efforts to stop Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army. While some of the defenders of the Stop Kony! viral video campaign suggested that it was forgivable for the video to make factual errors, including the number of members in the LRA and the fact that Kony’s moved out of Uganda, in the name of raising broader awareness about Kony’s brutality, it’s not particularly clear why such a thing was necessary—or effective. In fact, there’s been rather significant media attention paid to the campaign against Kony over the past several years. Samuel Childers, the evangelical preacher and biker who’s made it a personal mission to stop Kony, was profiled in Vanity Fair in 2010 and the subject of a movie starring Gerard Butler, Machine Gun Preacher, released last year. In other words, Kony, and the kind of militant interventionism by white Americans that Stop Kony championed, are already media stars here in the U.S. Stop Kony’s exaggerations weren’t necessary to achieve that kind of fame, and as Max Fisher at the Atlantic’s pointed out, their efforts seem to have produced a short-term interest spike rather than a long-term engagement.

In a recent essay in the New York Times examining the ideas of John D’Agata, a writer and professor who got into an extended battle over an essay for The Believer that had already been rejected by Harper’s because of how fast and loose it played with the facts, Gideon Lewis-Kraus explains:

D’Agata proposes that we give up the idea that there is a genre called “nonfiction” and instead return to the blurrier, artier time (from Herodotus until around 1940) when we were content with the term “essay” — “an attempt, a trial, an experiment.” From his rostrum as an influential professor in the nonfiction program at the University of Iowa, D’Agata has often argued that we read such essays for the poetry of “experience” rather than for mere “accuracy.”…He does defend James Frey, sort of, because even though he thinks Frey is a bad writer, he did fulfill his one obligation to his readers: “to give them a good experience.”

But why should a good experience trump the facts? And if you’re giving readers of non-fiction a powerful experience that’s built on fabrications, doesn’t that mean the experience is hollow, in danger of imminent collapse? Isn’t the question of whether an experience is good deeply tied to its authenticity? That depends on whether the story is presented as true or not. It’s one thing if Mike Daisey (or, say, Tony Kushner) had written a play called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (in its own way a Kushner-like title), where actors played Daisey, his translator, and the people he interviewed, and included clear signifiers that what they were relating was fictional, whether in the character names they were given, the cadences of their dialogue, or in the use of made-up companies or locations. If an audience expects that they’ll experience fiction, and experiences fiction, if then there’s no inconsistency to undermine their experience. If an audience expects facts and is given fiction, the realization that they’ve lied to may be shattering, and permanently discrediting. “Each time, I left the theatre electrified,” Michael Schulman writes in the New Yorker of his experiences seeing Daisey, “in part because I took what I was hearing as non-fiction.”

Whether it’s Mike Daisey, Stop Kony’s factual errors, or Greg Mortenson’s lies about his experiences in Central Asia, embellishing perfectly powerful stories for effect speaks of a insecurity about the power of the facts. And to an extent, I understand that sense of desperate urgency to bring attention to a cause in which is someone is deeply invested. We live in a deeply broken world, and it’s hard for an issue to break through and become a priority for the large number of people it would take to make a meaningful difference. But you can’t bridge the difference between what the facts are and what they wish you were with fiction if your viewers or listeners expect facts—and if you expect to motivate them to act in the world.

Earlier this year, This American Life broadcast its most popular episode ever, an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, about labor conditions in Apple’s supply-chain factories. Today, in a letter posted on the website of Chicago Public Media, which produces the show, host Ira Glass announced that TAL was retracting the story, citing numerous fabrications in Daisey’s account, and the breakdown of the program’s fact-checking process which allowed the episode to make it to the air. While there will be numerous debates about what happened at This American Life and the nature of non-fiction writing, there’s another significant question at stake: did Daisey’s report actually do what he’d claimed was his goal and move people to action?

It’s not that the misdeeds of managers at FoxConn were a secret before Daisey’s story aired. Fantastic reporting on the subject has been done prior by Wired, which chronicled a rash of suicides at a factory run by Foxconn, a key member of Apple’s supply chain, and by the New York Times since, chronicling abuses at a number of Apple suppliers. But Daisey’s monologue stirred up a particular debate. A petition inspired by the broadcast attracted 250,000 online signatures in a matter of days; Daisey became a cable news regular, and the story hot talking-head fodder; and as the wave of stories crested, Apple itself invited independent auditors onto its assembly lines and pressured its primary manufacturer to increase wages in response to growing public outrage. For activists who have been trying for years to pressure technology companies into embracing stricter labor standards in much the same way they did the garment industry, this felt like a moment.

But for all of the attention that Apple’s toxic partnership with FoxConn received in the last few months, Apple’s stock climbed above $600 a share this week. Their latest product is expected to break more sales records. And by some measures Apple is now the world’s largest corporation. Consumers may have been moved to sign petitions, but not, apparently, to change their purchasing decisions. Daisey claims he was motivated to fabrication by a desire to speak for vulnerable Chinese workers, and to connect deeply with American listeners. But the effect of his work may not have been as deep as he believed it to be. What we need is honest accounts of what Apple does to the workers it its supply chain. Stories that are true, rather than simply moving, are the only possible starting place for a campaign to hold Apple—and ourselves—truly accountable for the conditions that the company and we as consumers benefit from.

The bridge is yours.

-Apple suppliers may be better than other Chinese employers, but relativism is not exactly a victory.

-Checking in with James Murphy.

-I’m sort of sad we won’t get to see Michele Bachmann on Dancing With the Stars.

-Sometimes, American audiences do the right thing: Glee‘s ratings are dropping.

-The path from Canadian TV to American premium cable.