Rob Schmitz confronts Mike Daisey on This American Life’s ‘Retraction’

Sometimes being a good reporter is as easy as Googling it.

That’s all it took for Marketplace Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz to unravel a web of lies told by monologist Mike Daisey in his stage performance “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which was later adapted for radio by This American Life, and downloaded nearly a million times on the Internet.

On Friday, Marketplace published Schmitz’s investigative report debunking Daisey’s story after finding his Chinese translator: “I could pretend finding her took amazing detective work,” he says. “But basically, I just typed ‘Cathy and translator and Shenzhen’ into Google.”

Listen to the complete episode of This American Life.