Back home—as was protocol at Marketplace for story ideas—Schmitz sat down to write a memo to his editors and producers in Los Angeles, where the show was based. “I wasn’t sure my editors knew who Daisey was,” Schmitz says. So in his memo, he summarized Daisey’s professional background, explained the monologue and its performances to sold-out audiences, detailed his interview with Lee, stated point by point each apparent falsehood of Daisey’s, and attached the downloaded file of the TALtranscript. To illustrate the show’s impact, Schmitz did a Lexis-Nexis search of Daisey’s interviews following thebroadcast. In every interview, Daisey recounted all that he claimed to have observed during his China trip—much of which was fabrication, Schmitz noted. “It took hours to write this memo,” Schmitz says. By the time he finished, it was nearly 15 pages.

“I think we’ve got a good story” for Marketplace , he wrote. But as a correspondent, the decision was not his to make. He pressed “send,” and the email went to Managing Editor George Judson; Executive Producer Deborah Clark; host Kai Ryssdal; and John Buckley, foreign editor. Clark and Judson met over the weekend and called Schmitz. They told him they would share his memo with TAL.

Contacting TAL . On Monday, March 5, Marketplace Executive Producer Clark emailed Glass as well as TAL Senior Producer Snyder to let them know that a Marketplace reporter was working on a story and Clark needed to talk to them. When Glass and his colleagues learned her news, they were distressed. Says Glass:

We’re a reporting outfit, so to hear that we would make an error, and that we would make an error on a show that had been so visible, was just a terrible, terrible feeling.

They were grateful that Marketplace had contacted TAL directly before going on air with Schmitz’s story. “They were reaching out to say, ‘how should we handle this?’… I think it speaks to the collegiality in public radio,” comments Glass. Schmitz’s producers and editors wanted Marketplace to run the story of Daisey’s deception—but only with TAL taking the lead.

On March 6, Schmitz received a call from Glass. “He was troubled by all this,” Schmitz recalls. The two talked for a couple of hours. Glass questioned Schmitz closely about Lee’s veracity. “He had a hard time coming to believe that much of [Daisey’s monologue] was false,” Schmitz says. But by the end of the phone call, Glass understood that Daisey had lied to him, the TAL staff and theatergoers. “[Glass] was almost in a state of shock,” says Schmitz.

Schmitz advised Glass, who wanted to confront Daisey, to plan carefully. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Schmitz told Glass. Schmitz had read on the performer’s blog how Daisey dealt with criticism: “I’ve seen how he’s reacted. He gets very angry… When he’s questioned, he goes ballistic.” Schmitz advised Glass to meet with Daisey as close to airtime as possible. Interviewing him immediately “gives [Daisey time] to bully us or shift the narrative,” he said.

Glass and his team moved into crisis management mode. Besides Snyder and Producer Reed, they enlisted Emily Condon, who handled relations with the press. Condon contacted Daniel Ash, WBEZ vice president for strategic communications, for guidance. “We needed to figure out if we’d talk to the press, and what we would say if we did,” says Glass. “Do we issue a press release?”

More important than the press, however, was the TAL audience. How should TAL break the news, and what could it do to repair any resulting damage? “There was kind of an image and business question of us worrying that people would just stop trusting us,” says Glass.

We felt like we had to be straight with the audience about what the truth was, what Daisey had said that was true and was not true. We had to be clear: how did we mess it up?

The team quickly concluded that it was essential to respond on air to what Schmitz had uncovered, and that TAL would seek a response from Daisey. “From the time that we heard that we were wrong, it was obvious that we were going to go on air and correct it, and it was obvious as soon as we thought it through that we would want Mike [Daisey] to respond,” clarifies Glass. That still left some questions open. Glass recalls the choices:

There was an editorial question of what exactly we were going to say on the air, and at what length. Then there was the mechanical part of it: was Rob [Schmitz] going to be an interview? Was he going to file [his own] story? Was this going to fill an entire episode, or was this just going to be a part of an episode that was essentially about something else?