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

All the way back on Page 1, I said we in the media were "addicted to the quote."
Why?
Because we're afraid somebody else will have a quote we didn't have.
Because quoting somebody cuts out about 250 words in a 750 word story, making our job easier.
The heck with that.

 

Would she have been as hard on Bryant if he wasn't an ex-employee of the Post?

 

Well, he had this leg to stand on:
"OK, so no more interviews. I'm done cooperating with you. What do I get out of this symbiotic relationship if you make me look stupid? You get material for your story, I get screwed."
So your stand would have accomplished exactly what?

 

Based on what I've read here, if Brown used "symbiotic relationship," and I was the reporter, I'd have fainted.

 

I remember seeing a documentary on Clemente and his thoughts regarding the way the Pittsburgh writers wrote every one of his quotes verbatim, and since he had a heavy, heavy accent, his Ts were Ds and so on. His thought was that they wouldn't clean it up because he was a "double nigger" -- being black and hispanic -- and the writers wanted to make him look ignorant.

I think there's a huge difference between fixing the grammar and fixing the sounds, as in Clemente's case. I will never change one word for another, but I don't ever write "gonna" or jargon like that. I believe there's a section in the AP Guide about that type of scenario. At least, I read it there a couple years ago.

 

I just finished Clemente, and it's amazing how reporters used to quote Clemente. Hugely offensive.

Rick Reilly did a really stupid column last year quoting Ozzie Guillen in that way. Someone should "riff" on that crap.

 

Joe Williams asked, "Would she have been as hard on Bryant if he wasn't an ex-employee of the Post? "


Yes. It's not about who is or is not on the payroll. The ombudsman's job is to toss reporters and editors under the bus. Why? Because this makes the organization look TOUGH and HARD-NOSED and ASSERTIVE and OBJECTIVE. The ombudsman exists to suck up to the reader and to give the paper the appearance of self-flaggelation.

 

Dropping circulation, dipping ad revenues, job cuts, desk consolidations, papers being sold, papers being bought, health care cost increases.


And this is what we're talking about. No wonder 90-percent of the people outside of the industry wonder what exactly we're smoking.

 

There are reasons you might have to clean up Guillen's quotes, but they have nothing to do with his accent.

 

This is a discussion that's been going on for over 50 years . . . and the debate still rages. In the early '50s, the Cleveland Browns had a running back in camp who was just out of high school -- the famed Cookie Gilchrist. A Plain Dealer writer did a story on him and quoted Cookie exactly as he sounded -- young and not particularly well educated. (Cookie had decided to pass up college and go straight to the pros.)
The next day, Jim Brown threatened to break the writer in half if he ever pulled a "stunt" like that again.
Half a century later, we're still trying to agree on the correct way to handle these things.

 

O, it's the same in any line of work; lots of inside talk about how the sausage gets made that no one else cares about

 

It's amazing, when you think about it, that an athlete who doesn't speak the language well has no problem mangling it. But when he sees it in black and white, he's suddenly offended.

You would think the correct course of action would be to take from that, and make an effort to speak more correctly.
I guess they want it both ways.

My personal policy with Spanish-speaking athletes has always been to ask questions in Spanish whenever possible (it was difficult, because when I do it in a pack, the rest of the reporters would look at me like I was showing off, and give me dirty looks like I was going to get quotes they didn't get).

Or, if the grammar was turned around (since French is my first language, and the two are similar, I know that just about every sentence will get flipped), I'll flip it back.

With Americans who don't speak it well, if it's just a word or two, I'll usually leave it. It it's totally mangled, it's a case-by-case basis.

Since I'm not an over-quoter, it's surprising how rarely it really becomes an issue.