‘Journalists can play with quotes’

September 29, 2010 By

Insanity.

That’s all I could think of when I read this line in a Fortune magazine article about why we’ve seen no lawsuits from Facebook or its founder Mark Zuckerberg despite all the likelihood that “The Social Network,” compelling as I expect it to be, is based more on fiction than fact:

An obvious part of the answer lies in the creative license that American law gives to writers. A novelist can pen a roman a clef, journalists can play with quotes, Oliver Stone can do a wicked screed like W. — all are protected under the First Amendment as long as the material isn’t outright libelous. The fact the works play with the truth is legally beside the point unless the fiction is so over the line that it harms somebody and does so recklessly.

I’m not sure about that last line. I’ve yet to take the upper division Law of Based on a True Story. So I’ll leave that one to the media law experts. And, would you believe it, that’s exactly what the author of this Fortune piece is.

David A. Kaplan, a former Wall Street lawyer, is a media law professor at New York University Law School. AKA NYU. AKA the sixth-highest-ranked law school in the nation.

I would imagine Kaplan knows his media law. But he might want to bone up on basic journalism ethics.

Playing with quotes is not — as in NEVER — an acceptable practice. Legally, it might be permissible, but practically and professionally it is not. Not if you want to have a future as a journalist. Call the subject back or settle for a softer quote or just paraphrase. But don’t ever play with their quote.

Sure, its standard for reporters to clean up “ums” and “ya knows” and add identifiers within brackets where it’s unclear whom is being referred to. That’s fine, and that’s basically it.

Quotes are just that: Quotes.

The verbatim recitation of someone’s perspective. They may be condensed, edited or bifurcated, but the exact words that appear on page need to be as true to what the subject said as the integrity of what’s left of it.

It’s a short leap from playing with someone’s words so that they sound the way a reporter wants and just straight making the quotes up. Paging Mr. Glass and Mr. Blair. And what in the world ever happened to Janet Cooke?

I imagine Kaplan feels like I am either being insincerely hyperbolic or that I misunderstood what he meant by “journalists can play with quotes.” I doubt the former and I hope for the latter.

To boot, it’s not as if hard-working reporters need to transform quotes into something they want to use. (Here’s an example of what happens when lazy reporters make up quotes.) Devious as it may seem, a good reporter is always able to find the right voice for a money quote that poignantly conveys the exact message the reporter is trying to get across.

On a different note — and this from someone who likely will see “The Social Network” on opening night — I find equally troubling the whole underlying story for the film. It’s based on a book by Ben Mezrich, whose “Bringing Down the House” I devoured in one sitting. I admired his style, until I learned it was prone to composite characters and fictionalizations. He’s sort of like the Bizarro Dan Brown. Makes me feel like James Frey got a raw deal.

I think that I’ll step down from my soapbox now.

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Filed Under: Academia, Journalism
  • James

    Thanks for this, I do hope this article is widely read and the author of the piece recants. Honesty is essential in journalism.

    I remember when I was a child, our family returned from doing charity work overseas, and the local paper came to our house to interview us. I was very young, but what was published as my words, I could not have possibly said. The journalist was surely trying to “add color” by bringing some youthful enthusiasm and naive-sounding words from a teenager into the story. Nonetheless, I lost, at that moment, a great deal of trust for journalism, and for authority in general. So much so, that I didn’t bother contacting the publication with a letter to the editor. I figured that if the one journalist had seen fit to misquote me, they would could well re-write my letter whole cloth.

    Journalism works on trust. If we believe the author capable of complete fabrication, we may as well be reading fiction.

  • http://www.biblebeltblogger.com Frank Lockwood

    Another good post. In defense of Mr. Kaplan, though, he is speaking about First Amendment law, torts and libel, not journalism ethics.

    Again: He’s speaking about the creative license that American law gives journalists in some instances. There are plenty of deadly journalism sins that are not, necessarily, criminal or libelous.

  • Martha

    “Comment is free but facts are sacred”, C.P. Scott, editor of the “Manchester Guardian”.

    Except it sometimes feels like a peck of fact to a ton of comment in some stories – or are they opinion pieces?

    When the difference gets blurred like that, it can seem to outsiders as if journalists are indeed playing with quotes (though that seems more to me like the way the blurb on the back of books picks out the good parts of reviews so that you get ‘stunning…piece of…original fiction’ where the reviewer may have said ‘this is a stunning example of how not to write a novel; as a piece of bad writing it is supreme but as original fiction it fails abysmally’ and yet get away with it because you’re quoting only words used in the article and not making any up or adding any.)

  • Jerry

    I think the primary issue with journalists can play with quotes is taking quotes out of context which happens all too often. I agree that too is a journalistic sin and one that happens all too often.

  • Dave

    James, I had an interesting experience with a letter to the editor. It was very lightly edited, in that the last sentence of a given paragraph would be turned into the lead sentence of the next paragraph. The letter was significantly punched up; it had much more impact. Naturally I was delighted.

    But it could just have legitimately been edited to the opposite effect, to blunt its impact — something that never occurred to me at the time.

    Editing quotes is an edgy business.

  • Jon in the Nati

    Playing with quotes is not — as in NEVER — an acceptable practice. Legally, it might be permissible, but practically and professionally it is not. Not if you want to have a future as a journalist.

    Legally, it is very permissible; the only sense in which it is not permissible is via the opprobrium of the journalistic community.

    Trouble is, I would submit that the community as a whole is less willing to come down like a ton of bricks on people who do violate the (allegedly) sacred journalistic ethnics I and every other journalist learned about in journalism school. I won’t say that shenanigans with quotes and such are now okay, but I think there is an increasing reluctance to strongly and publicly condemn people engage in them (leaving aside extremely high-profile, broad-sweeping cases like Mr. Glass). I feel this is especially true when the purported shenanigans serve some partisan or political purpose, regardless of which side one is one.

    Complicating the matter, of course, is proliferation of talking-heads-as-entertainers-not-journalists. Is O’Reilly a journalist? Is Keith Olbermann? What about Glenn Beck? A pretty good argument could be made for every one of them being an entertainer, or some manner of pseudo-journalist, giving them at least some ability to disclaim common journalistic ethics when it suits them.

    If I sound frustrated, I am; it is a complicated and oft-infuriating matter.

  • Brad A. Greenberg

    I’ve long had a fun and confusing identity. I will now add “journalistic ethnic” to that potpourri.

  • Jon in the Nati

    I’ve long had a fun and confusing identity. I will now add “journalistic ethnic” to that potpourri.

    I suppose I will as well; that’s what I get for quickly typing something that gets me that worked up.