Meanwhile, as was standard, a TAL producer fact-checked the monologue. Any news organization, says Glass, “has to be very careful about the perfect accuracy of everything,” not least to avoid libel charges. In March 2011, for example, TAL aired a show about a Georgia judge, which examined her sentencing history. ^[21] “The story raised a number of questions about her and the way she ran the courtroom, and that was something that was meticulously fact checked,” says Glass, including a review of the script by libel lawyers. TAL was especially careful after its experience with Stephen Glass (no relation), a contributor who in 1998 was discovered to have fabricated much of what he wrote for the New Republic and others, and had also discussed on TAL.

For the Daisey story, TAL followed its usual procedures. “In fact-checking, our main concern was whether the things that Mike says about Apple and about its supplier, Foxconn, which makes this stuff, were true,” Glass later recalled. ^[22] Producer Reed contacted industry sources to verify facts in the script. The facts checked out, corroborated by other press articles, advocacy group reports and Apple itself in audit documents. Said Glass:

Overall, we checked with over a dozen people—those would be journalists who covered these factories, people who work with the electronics industry in China, activists, labor groups—about the working conditions that Mike Daisey describes in his show. And nobody seemed surprised by them. ^[23]

Reed also communicated with Daisey through extensive emails and conversations. In one email, Reed wrote at the top: “Here’s a list of things I want to run by you. Some are questions just for clarifying facts…. Being that news stations are obviously a different kind of forum than the theater, we wanted to make sure that this thing is totally, utterly unassailable by anyone who might hear it.” Added Glass: “Although he's not a journalist, we made clear to him that anything that he was going to say on our program would have to live up to journalistic standards. He had to be truthful.” The TAL production team did uncover and correct some errors. For example, Daisey’s translator apparently misunderstood or mistranslated the number of seats in the Foxconn cafeteria as 10,000, whereas other press accounts indicated that while Foxconn served 10,000, it could seat only 4,000 at a time.

Daisey seemed to appreciate the extra digging.“I totally get that,” he wrote to Reed. “I want you to know that makes sense to me. A show built orally for the theater is different than what typically happens for news stations. I appreciate you taking the time to go over this.” Glass, too, recalled that “Mike [Daisey] wanted it to be as accurate as possible. He viewed with pleasure what we were doing because it was going to give him, in effect, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.” ^[24]

Reed also asked Daisey for contact information for his translator, Cathy. “Brian asked Mike for the phone number of his translator, and Mike told us that he actually had changed the name in the stage show, because he didn’t want her to get harassed,” recalls Glass. Daisey told Reed that her real name was Anna. ^[25] When Reed nonetheless asked for her phone number, Daisey answered that “the phone numbers that he had for her just weren’t going through, that she must have gotten a new cellphone, and he had no way to reach her,” notes Glass. He adds:

Because other things that he had said to us seemed to check out when we talked to over a dozen people familiar with the practices of Apple and other electronics manufacturers in China…when he said he didn’t know how to reach the translator anymore and the phone numbers didn’t work, we believed him.