Cleaning up the Quote: Wash Post Ombudsman faults ex-Reporter Howard Bryant

"If uh, quotes uh, weren't motherfucking cleaned the fuck up and all that shit, you know, like in a week or some shit like that, uh, believe me bitches, there would be no god damn fucking quotes in this piece of shit paper at all."

When I start seeing quotes like that, I'll start believing everybody that seems aghast at this. There is not a paper in the country that truly follows a quotes verbatim policy.

 

I don't know what you cover, but any athlete who would say that on the record wouldn't make it in my paper. Sorry.

 

Here's where it gets murky for me: When we try to capture a quote "accurately" by using phonetics, what is our standard? There's no dictionary to check for the correct spelling. Sometimes we're just guessing, when it comes to dropping "g's" and such ("I be bustin' loose..."). Five different reporters might write up a quote five different ways, with different spelling and punctuation (Bryant and Wise obviously differed on commas vs. periods). So claiming that you only put "actual quotes" between quotation marks is quite a claim; chances are, someone -- or a dozen other someones -- striving to do the exact same thing will end up with slightly different versions.

At which point: Who's right? Who's wrong?

Have you ever seen yourself quoted somewhere, and been horrified at how you said "yeah" instead of "yes" or "workin' " instead of "working"?

Part of this is due to the medium: Going from spoken word to printed word. What sounds totally natural when you're standing there with a guy suddenly seems illiterate when it's committed to print, with bad grammar and the "uhs" and "y'knows" preservered for posterity. I'd ask the Post ombudsperson whether we're supposed to include every "y'know" verbatim or the start-over quotes, etc. People can stake out the high ground on this and aspire to being pristine, but they're going to end up with a lot more paraphrasing, a lot fewer quotes and much less lively copy.

There is a real world of reporting and writing, and then there is the ombudsperson or office-dwelling editor's world of reporting and writing.

 

The beauty of Exile's quote:
It was grammatically correct.

 

I actually think paraphrasing is better than quotes in 90 percent of cases.

 

I just interviewed a coach who said his team has "a real coerciveness."

 

So I guess our options are:

"If uh, quotes uh, weren't motherfucking cleaned the fuck up and all that shit, you know, like in a week or some shit like that, uh, believe me bitches, there would be no god damn fucking quotes in this piece of shit paper at all."

or

"If... quotes...weren't... cleaned...up... in a week... there would be no ...quotes in this... [news]paper."

or

"If quotes weren't cleaned up, in a week there would be no quotes in this newspaper."

or

Smith believes that if quotes were not cleaned up and reprinted verbatim, most athletes would soon stop talking to reporters.

 

Bingo.

 

Smith believes that if quotes were not cleaned up and reprinted verbatim, most athletes would soon stop talking to reporters.

"I never motherfucking said that."
-Smith the next day

 

To be fair, they can claim that for anything. See also Charles Barkley.

 

Are all persons in the public domain treated with equal editorial discretion in cleaning up quotes?

If a Congressman was interviewed about funding for a highway in his district and he said, "All that money that be coming to my district be good" would it be justified to clean up the quote? Maybe that Congressman didn't have the benefit of a college education like Clinton Portis.
Why are professional athletes treated differently than any other millionaire or person in the public eye?

The fact that reporters are more familiar with their subjects doesn't seem to breed contempt but sympathy.

I wonder if on the news side, the crime beat writer has the same sympathy to the prosecutor who lost a murder case, or the local political reporter's sympathetic quotes of a Councilman caught with his hands in the cookie jar, a live boy or dead girl.

Sports reporting seems to very cozy and almost incestuous compared to news, business and even entertainment

 

I have to agree that you're overstating it. Even if the readers pick up on "anybody" in your story and "nobody" on TV or whatever (which I think is unlikely), they could very well think that you cleaned up the quote. I don't think it automatically causes them to question your credibility. It's my belief that readers don't care as much about this as we do.