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One of the most popular episodes broadcast by the public radio show "This American Life" told the story of deplorable working conditions endured by Chinese workers who make Apple Inc.'s beloved products.

The segment, which ran in January, consisted mainly of a monologue: the firsthand account of Mike Daisey, a storyteller and self-described gonzo journalist who turned his 2010 visit to China into a dramatic one-man show.

It was a little too dramatic, as it turns out.

"This American Life," produced by Chicago public radio station WBEZ-FM, broadcast an excerpt from Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" and presented it as fact but failed to identify that it was filled with fictionalized incidents. The radio show's host, Ira Glass, took to the airwaves Friday to retract the broadcast, exposing fabrications in Daisey's story and explaining how the show's producers were fooled.

Because movies and theatrical shows based on real people and events often take liberties with the truth in pursuit of a good plot, Daisey's monologue as live theater might not have come under scrutiny. But when "This American Life," a show acclaimed for its journalistic storytelling, decided to broadcast an excerpt, it treated Daisey's tale as a factual report, and it made clear to listeners that they should accept every word as the truth.

Radio show staffers told listeners during the original broadcast that they conducted a fact-checking session with Daisey, adding to the veracity of the monologue. Daisey stuck with his story, according to Glass.

"Although he's not a journalist, we made it clear to him that anything he was going to say on our show would have to live up to journalistic standards," Glass said, according to a transcript released before Friday's show. "He had to be truthful. And he lied to us."

In Daisey's monologue, he recounts a visit to a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where iPhones and iPads are manufactured. A self-professed "worshipper in the House of Mac," Daisey exposes underage employees, unsafe conditions and a downtrodden workforce behind the electronic gadgets that he and so many others have been buying with almost religious devotion.

Among the more egregious fabrications was a tale about Foxconn workers on the iPhone assembly line in Shenzhen who Daisey said were suffering from hexane poisoning. That was apparently based on an incident that happened at another Apple supplier in Suzhou, nearly 1,000 miles away.

One of the more moving anecdotes involved a worker whose hand was said to have been mangled making iPads. Daisey recounts showing him an actual finished iPad, which the worker had never seen before and who calls it a "kind of magic." That incident never occurred, according to Glass.

Daisey has created 15 one-man shows since 1997, many based on his travels and personal experiences, covering everything from the Department of Homeland Security to the New York subway system. He admitted that his current show is "not up to the standards of journalism," but he claimed artistic license.

"I'm not going to say that I didn't take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard," Daisey said in an interview on Friday's broadcast. "But I stand behind my work."

On his website, however, Daisey acknowledged there was a problem.

"The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism," he said. "For this reason, I regret that I allowed "This American Life" to air an excerpt from my monologue."

Launched in Chicago in 1995, "This American Life" is produced by WBEZ and Chicago Public Media, but the show moved to New York in 2006. It is distributed to more than 500 U.S. public radio stations, and has built its reputation and its following through insightful and unconventional long-form storytelling. But crossing the line from journalism into theater was clearly a misstep for the award-winning show.

The original episode, "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory," quickly became the most popular podcast in the radio show's history, with 888,000 downloads as of Friday. Listeners delivered a petition with nearly 250,000 names calling for better working conditions in China, ratcheting up pressure on Apple, which agreed to a third-party audit of the factories.

But Daisey's story didn't ring true to one avid listener, Rob Schmitz, a Shanghai-based correspondent for American Public Media's "Marketplace" show.

"When I heard the segment, I was surprised at a few of the details," Schmitz said by phone Friday from China.

Schmitz, who regularly covers manufacturing in China, flew to the Foxconn factory on Feb. 29 and uncovered enough inconsistencies in Daisey's story to alert his editors at American Public Media. They contacted their counterparts at Chicago Public Media, who agreed to collaborate on the follow-up story.

For Daisey the show ostensibly goes on, with bookings from New England to England. But not in Chicago. An April 7 appearance at the Chicago Theatre, sponsored by WBEZ and hosted by Ira Glass, was canceled Friday.

rchannick@tribune.com

Twitter @RobertChannick