Frequent commenter rozele wrote to me about the afterword to Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, calling it “a pretty amazing example of the godawful things done to people’s words in the name (quite explicitly) of turning what we actually speak into True Language”:
in the course of a psychoanalytically-informed account of journalists’ writing processes, and what she describes as a defense of “the necessity for [journalistic] mediation” (by “showing how the literally true may actually be a kind of falsification of reality”), malcolm gives us a transcription of a section of a tape-recorded interview, and then what she asserts is the rendering that appeared in the main text of the book. the latter, she has already told us, is “English”; the former something she calls “tape-recorderese”, which she very clearly considers not to be language at all. “translating” the one into the other is, apparently, absolutely necessary for “trustworthy quotation”.
it’s fascinating on several levels. to my ear the rewrite (without altering its abstract factual content) quite thoroughly transforms the tone, emphasis, and impact of what malcolm’s interviewee says, rather than simply shortening the passage or cutting false starts or abandoned shifts of direction. on top of that, what she claims is the published rendering in fact omits the entire last sentence of what is actually printed in the book as a quotation – no trace of which appears in any form in the transcription excerpt she provides. and what comes through most strongly is her absolute contempt for what she denies is “English”: the language people actually speak and the ways we speak it.
it makes me wonder whether people whose conception of language is constrained to literary writing are even aware of the layers of meaning that they’re refusing to acknowledge. i get the impression that malcolm is not – that she thinks what she’s doing is adding, not destroying, meaning and complexity – though perhaps this is because i can’t picture taking pride in that endeavor, much less calling attention to it at length while discussing my working methods.
I haven’t read the book, but I certainly agree with rozele’s point. (We discussed Janet Malcolm and a different trial back in 2010.)
Actual field linguists can get quite sniffy about anything that isn’t “tape-recorderese.”
Once again, this sad tale demonstrates that even basic linguistics forms no part at all of a typical broad liberal education. (C P Snow would doubtless nod smugly.)
This reminds me a bit of the stranglehold that the educational elite who had learnt Literary Welsh (a form of language about four hundred years removed from any actual speech, insofar as it isn’t altogether artificial) used to have over what was regarded as really being proper Welsh at all. (The preface to Stephen Williams’ 1980 English translation of his Welsh grammar talks of “debased colloquial usages.” There is, oddly enough, nothing like that in the original Welsh version. Maybe the reader of that was assumed to have already drunk the Kool-Aid.)
To be a bit fairer to Janet Malcolm, the study of the grammar of spoken English is distinctly harder than that of written English, and the necessary terms have really not made it out of the linguistic ghetto. Spoken English has a precise and elaborate system of focus marking, for example, which is normally completely unrepresented in writing*, and which few L1 speakers could even describe, despite using it all the time whenever they open their mouths.
* Good writers know how to work round this fundamental failure of the writing system with conventional paraphrases and suchlike. But it’s unnatural to do that, and produces sentences nobody normally actually comes out with spontaneously.
This is relevant to my interests. Where can I find a description of this focus system? I’m worried you’ll say CGEL…
Here is the page with the tape-recorderese and Malcolm’s English translation
@Lars:
Your fears are, alas, amply warranted …
(Chapter 16; pp1370ff …)
In general, focus is a difficult subject, to say the least. I seem to recall that Martin Haspelmath denies that it is a cross-linguistically coherent concept at all. But then, he says that about everything …
Lavukaleve gets my personal award for most focus-obsessed language EVAH. If you can get a look at Angela Terrill’s grammar, it comes up passim. She has lots of handy literature citations too.
Focus interacts with tense/aspect in an interesting way in Kusaal. I eventually discovered that similar things have been noted in a good many Bantu languages: Larry Hyman, one of the Bantuist gurus, published on it way back in 1984, but nobody much seems to have run with it until Tom Güldemann twenty years later.
Thanks, mollymooly!
How about this dissertation (Cohan, The Realization and Function of
Focus in Spoken English)?
@mollymooly:
Apparently the actual original words spoken “lack the atmosphere of truthfulness.” This misses the point so cosmically that I thought I must have misinterpreted Malcolm initially. But no, she really means it. The journalist’s impression of what the speaker meant is more valid than what they actually said.
Yes, my jaw dropped when I read that.
What purpose would there have been to quote the entire taperecorderese passage verbatim? You could have picked out the substantive part close to verbatim (as Malcolm sort of did) and do the relevant part of the rest that sets it up in paraphrase w/o needing to present it as a direct quote. Say “He explained that the defense counsel Kornstein never ended up having a chance to put him back on the witness stand for additional testimony (w/ or w/o parenthetical about a plane to catch and time being wasted by dumb questions), but that after his initial day of testimony he had realized” and then into the verbatim with punctuation marking the transition. How hard is that?
In presenting her (quite reasonable) paraphrase as oratio recta, Malcolm is in fact deceiving the reader. Her motive is no doubt pure, but that is no excuse.
She might plead that a sophisticated reader will actually know that what journalists present as ipsissima verba is in fact normally no such thing, but that really doesn’t help one bit. She ought to know better, and we should be able to expect better from honourable reporters.
“Truthfulness” must be autocorrupt for truthiness.
@JWB:
personally, i might argue for the speaker’s actual words as transcribed, complete with false starts etc. that’s an approach i’ve found powerful in anna deavere smith’s early work, including journalistic pieces like her 1996 “Broken Sentences” as well as her transcript-based plays. but even those are of necessity built on selection and excerpting. and i’d expect that people more committed to a psychoanalytic view of language would also find that approach compelling, since it would allow for the presence of the moments of static and rupture that freud placed at the heart of the discipline.
but for journalistic purposes, i expect exactly the kind of middle-ground approach that you describe: an absolute minimum of intervention on what’s between quotation marks, and indirect quotation where that’s not stylistically feasible. malcolm absolutely disagrees. her objection isn’t difficulty; quite the opposite. she finds all kinds of ways of saying that the journalist can and should actively rewrite what their subjects actually say, but they all basically come down to an explicit declaration that journallists’ literary inventions are the only possible way to access the truth of what someone says, and should be considered more accurate than a mere transcript.
“As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean—thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak. […] Texts containing dialogue and monologue derived from a tape—however well edited the transcript may be—tend to retain some trace of their origin (almost a kind of metallic flavor) and lack the atmosphere of truthfulness present in work where it is the writer’s own ear that has caught the drift of the subject’s thought.”[p155; p157]
she’s absolutely right that we don’t talk in sentences (or in prose at all – she even manages to cite m. jourdain!), but in every other way what she has to say is, to me, pretty appalling. and also amounts to such a clear confession of guilt in jeffrey masson’s lawsuit against her for fabricating quotations that i’m surprised it wasn’t brought in as evidence.
o, and – to DE’s point – if you go to p79 in the text mollymooly linked to (thank you!), you’ll find that what malcolm presented as her rewrite in the afterword is itself not what she printed!
the final sentence of what she actually included in the main text makes a huge leap in both analytic and poetic terms – and its absence from the later citation leaves no real alternative to believing that she left it out because it was a complete invention, in hopes that nobody would remember the passage well enough to notice. which i gotta say is both foolish (it’s easily the most memorable element of the quotation) and a classically freudian error-that-reveals-truth, of the kind that her erasure of “hesitations…contradictions…lacunae” aims to eliminate.
Yes, there are such people. To start from the assumption that everybody is like that is breathtaking. And that’s apart from the fact that getting people to say what they mean is the job of the interviewer, not the transcriber!
If I am reluctant to come out and say what I mean, it’s usually for a very good reason. I am not likely to appreciate a reporter telling everyone what I really meant (even if the reporter is actually right, and not projecting their own opinions onto me.)
Moreover, the fact that I prevaricated rather than answered directly is itself an important piece of information. What right has the reporter to censor this fact?
And if I am in fact incoherent, is the reporter doing their job if they present my actual words as having been perfectly clear and logical?
Seems to me that this dysfluency thing is being worked as an excuse for a systematic bad journalistic practice. (I imagine that this is no way a thing unique to Janet Malcolm: she’s just rather startlingly upfront about it.)
cf. sanewashing
I was going to say.
Don’t there exist actual guidelines for this (for the use of media that remain more than extremist propaganda outlets, obviously.)
Silent excision of ums and ers is normal, I think. I suppose you could even claim that this is an inevitable part of reducing speech to the inadequate medium of English orthography.
I suppose that you could do a Truss (Lynne not Liz) and say that this whole issue is one of punctuation. The Appalling Misuse of the Inverted Comma. Eats, Shoots and “Leaves.”
Re David E.’s theorizing about “honourable reporters”: Perhaps the most famous sentence the late Janet Malcolm ever wrote was the rather striking “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Which is indeed the opening sentence of the book under discussion. NB that she is using an old-timey “generic he,” the scope of which would not exclude her (unless she self-identified as a writer but not a “journalist,” which for all I know may have been the case).
While there are surely no totally honourable reporters, the implication that “they’re all the same” is no more true for reporters than for politicians. (In both cases, the lie is assiduously promoted by enemies of democracy. It should be stamped on with vigour wherever it raises its malignant head.)
Compare, oh, let’s say, Walter Duranty’s reporting of Ukraine with this man’s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)
Also, there is Tintin.
Mind you, he never really seems to do any actual, like, reporting.
And he was a bit collabo.
OK, maybe not Tintin.
I have not read Malcolm. I wonder whether her later work conformed to the extreme manifesto of this afterword. Plausibly it was a rehearsal for the defence offered in the ongoing libel trial, and her later work reflected a less presumptuous attitude?
Tintin was inserting himself into the story decades before New Journalism
“Tintin in the Land of the Hippies.”
“Tintin in Las Vegas.”
The notion of Tintin as gonzo journalist does have a certain appeal. (Milou would fit right in. That’s one mean sonofabitch.)
Perhaps Tintin was too hono[u]rable to make it as an actual reporter? But maybe there is actually a difference here that I too hastily elided between reporters (an old-timey artisanal trade that has fallen on hard times) and journalists (a fancy social-climber “profession” for the degreed and credentialed), and fundamental moral defects are more a problem with the latter group?
WP tells us that the term “gonzo journalism” antedates the first appearance of The Muppet of That Name, but only just. Eheu fugaces …
A 300 lb. “Samoan” Capt. Haddock has a certain appeal as well.
JWB, I don’t think Malcolm thinks that what she (and every other journalist) is doing is “morally indefensible” because of inexact quotations. I personally, like the clear information from a journalist about their treatment of the material. If a journalist tells me that their work is in a sense a work of fiction, a fiction closely aligned with facts, but nonetheless not a direct report, but some sort of reconstruction, I can live with that. I actually do not expect anything else. Most journalism that I read is quite obviously a journalist making up a “story” out of complicated web of circumstances with what goes in and out of the story heavily dependent on journalist’s personal opinion. (This is assuming that the writer is not simply lying) The idea that a lighter editing of direct quotations is going to be a significant improvement seems to me rather optimistic.
I must confess that I do not recall having ever viewed the Muppet-heavy 1970 Christmas tv special in which the Muppet of That Name supposedly first appeared, despite having been (at age 5) a good target audience member. Perhaps David E. has seen it? But I don’t read the wikipedia accounts to be claiming (at least not unambiguously claiming) that the actual name “Gonzo” was attached to the Muppet-in-question in that 1970 one-off rather than that the physical muppet-object first created for that occasion was brought out of the warehouse and dubbed “Gonzo” when repurposed as a recurring character in the Muppet Show proper that debuted in 1976.
And now it’s going to be hard to get clarification on these Muppet-naming-timeline issues because as bad luck would have it the Muppet-History subset of the internet has just been embroiled in controversy and scandal. https://brobible.com/culture/article/muppet-history-instagram-twitter-controversy-explainer/
Note FWIW that this social-media-controversy-explainer post comes with a little author’s bio note letting you know that the author has a bachelor’s degree in “Print Journalism” (from a perfectly good university) and is thus appropriately credentialed.
on the muppets tip, i have to plug my old friend max’s recent book of muppet history: Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography – it’s a tour de force.
and @DO/JWB: from malcolm’s perspective, the moral indefensibility that is the subject of The Journalist and the Murderer is about the relationship between journalist and subject – the question of the journalist’s intent when approaching and conversing with an interviewee, what the journalist says to them, and whether that can be (or can avoid being) misleading or deliberately false. the question of what the journalist does with/to their subjects’ words is related, but distinct: it’s the subject of Masson v. Malcolm, which she addresses (somewhat prematurely) in the afterword, but not of MacDonald v. McGinniss, which the book itself is about. and, for her, “journalism” explicitly includes the versions marked as fictionalized – capote’s In Cold Blood, above all, which repeatedly appears as a foil to McGinniss’ Fatal Vision – as well as the ostensibly purely factual stuff of daily papers.
Yes, to amplify rozele’s point, Malcolm’s critique re “morally indefensible” was definitely not in context intentionally directed to the practice she fessed up to herself in the same book. One has to do a little dot-connecting to appreciate the irony. Let me just note that in my own perhaps morally-dubious profession as a lawyer, I am actually subject to enforceable rules that in certain circumstances (certainly not all circumstances!) require me to affirmatively warn someone I might be talking to that despite the positive rapport and aura of trust and confidence I am hopefully inspiring they should know that I remain free to betray their trust and confidence in pursuit of someone else’s agenda. AFAIK, essentially no journalists give such warnings, nor is the notion that perhaps they should within the Overton window of their profession’s self-reflection on how it conducts itself. And that undisclosed risk of betrayal is more precisely what Malcolm was focused on when she was banging on about “morally indefensible.”
He did… in the Congo…
The thing here is that sanewashing and bothsiderism, in the US, are not features of extremist propaganda outlets. They’re mainstream: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, that kind of thing. As far as I can tell, Malcolm is right when she seems to believe she’s just spelling out what everyone is already thinking and how everyone is already working.
Fox instead simply declines to report things that would run counter to its propaganda.
Our own dear BBC has got the bothsiderism thing; it works with a definition of “balance” that is fulfilled by having two opposing extremists present their views, and unfortunately generalises this to having an actual expert “balanced” by an extremist.
It really only breaks out of this in cases where UK public opinion is already fairly united, as with vaccines or climate change, where in the UK, as yet, the antivax crowd and the Big Oil shills don’t get no respect. It was still big news when the BBC plucked up their courage on climate: accusations of Cultural Marxist Extreme Socialism duly followed from the usual suspects.
AFAIK, essentially no journalists give such warnings…
People who speak regularly to journalists — politicians, business leaders, etc etc — know that what they say is ‘on the record’ unless specifically declared not to be, and also know that they have no control over what the journalist writes. Hence the complaints about remarks being taken out of context and so on, which to my jaded ears (I was occasionally a reporter in my working days) come across as disagreement with the reporter’s take rather than factual concerns. As Michael Kinsley once said, a gaffe is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth.
I haven’t read Malcolm’s book and don’t know what sort of agreement, if any, she had with her subject. I do know that her hair-shirt remarks about the nature of journalism are not highly esteemed by others in the profession — for obvious reasons, you might say.
Everything gets a little murkier when a journalist talks to someone who is not familiar with the rules of the game. But, for example, when a reporter talks to victims of a crime or a natural disaster, or to a lottery winner, there is an unspoken assumption that the reporter is not out for blood. And journalists typically do not treat your average Joe the same way they would treat a public figure.
@David L.: the scenario Malcolm was focused on is where the journalist is in fact out for blood because the interviewee who is not familiar with the rules of the game is e.g. not the alleged crime victim but the alleged crime perpetrator. Ideally such interviews would not happen because a competent lawyer would have advised the suspect not to talk and the suspect would have heeded the advice. In the specific situation Malcolm was focused on, the journalist who allegedly feigned sympathy for the murderer was doing so with the knowledge and approval of defense counsel because the journalist was offering cash (from what he hoped to make from the ultimately quite unsympathetic book he was going to write) that would help pay those same lawyers.
I am skeptical about whether the lawyers made the best decision but would need to know more about the details than I am interested in learning to have a well-informed opinion about that. The murderer did sue the journalist and (after a mistrial) obtained a settlement, but AFAIK never (at least formally/publicly) blamed his lawyers for not protecting him from the situation.
And journalists typically do not treat your average Joe the same way they would treat a public figure.
“Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”
(This is usually attributed to Jeremy Paxman, whose histrionically confrontational interview manner was geared strongly toward entertainment rather than enlightenment. Still, it beats Tucker-Putin.)
This is usually attributed to Jeremy Paxman
He was quoting Louis Heren
Thanks for that; it was an enjoyable interview, and I like that Paxman chap. Keep your distance from pols, and don’t let them get away with evasive non-answers! (I was taken aback at the end because I hadn’t grasped that it was from 2005.)
I wasn’t familiar with the surname Heren (and neither were my reference books); this site says:
In one of her other books (Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession) Janet Malcolm also discusses the significance of tape recorded and transcribed speech (it is about a researcher who taped analysis sessions and transcribes them):
A few months later, I happened to come across the rest of the papers that Dahl had thrust into my unwilling hand, and idly leafed through one of the less horrible-looking ones. I found myself reading it with growing excitement; though dauntingly titled “Countertransference Examples of the Syntactic Expression of Warded-Off Contents,” it was clear and fascinating. It told of a rather commonplace discovery that Dahl and his co-authors—Virginia Teller, a Ph.D. in linguistics, and the psychiatrists Donald Moss and Manuel Trujillo—had made while reading transcripts of a tape-recorded analysis, and of a most extraordinary inference that they had drawn from it. The discovery, familiar to all users of tape recorders, was the fact that people who sound all right when you are talking to them are actually speaking in a most peculiar fashion, as a verbatim transcript of their words will disclose. What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech is something like what the photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies revealed about animal and human locomotion; no one had ever seen the strange positions that Muybridge’s camera caught and froze, and no one had ever heard what the tape recorder pointed out about the weirdness and sloppiness of human speech. Dahl and his colleagues, instead of simply “allowing for” the difference between the spoken word and the transcript, as everyone before them had done, went on to take a closer look at the syntactical peculiarities that the transcript threw into relief, and it dawned on them that these peculiarities were no accident but had a hidden purpose: they were a devious way of expressing unacceptable wishes and feelings. The tool for the unmasking of these covert communications was Noam Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar, in which Virginia Teller was well versed. From the tape under study, a number of the analyst’s interventions were extracted and scrutinized for “hostility or seductiveness, approval or disapproval of the patient’s behavior, as well as excessive assertions of authority.”
Thanks, Kristian. That is disturbingly illuminating.
There has actually been a good bit of real linguistic work on how speech is organised. This is just Interpretation of Dreams Freudian fantasy.
Malcolm evidently had ideological reasons for systematically misrepresenting her subjects’ speech. I was too kind in attributing her bullshit to simple ignorance.
The tool for the unmasking of these covert communications was Noam Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar
A sort of Grand Unified Pseudoscience of language. May Pāṇini preserve us!
(Though Chomskyan systems in fact seem to have problems coping adequately with overt meaning, let alone “covert.” Perhaps the idea is that whatever Chomsky can’t account for in language, Freud can …)
It’s all in the Deep Structure, baby.
Don’t there exist actual guidelines for this
Mark Liberman had dozens and dozens of posts on this topic at Language Log, years back; this post from 2013, on Maureen Dowd getting caught red-handed, has a large collection of links. Pious declarations such as “Readers should be able to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said. The Times does not ‘clean up’ quotations” are bogus, as he demonstrates at length. And there’s at least one “long-time journalist and editor” from the Malcolm school, lecturing the ignorant linguists: no, no, good heavens, of course we don’t quote the interviewee’s actual words, that would “abdicate the interviewer’s responsibility to listen” and would make the poor dear look stoopid — why, *that* would be unethical! Obviously we “good writers” paraphrase as we like and then put quotation marks around the result to “make the piece feel more interactive and compelling to a reader”.
@David Eddyshaw: I think that actually sounds mountains worse than the material in The Interpretation of Dreams.
The Interpretation of Dreams is a really fun read. I perhaps should have cited instead The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, also very entertaining: its basic doctrine is that all speech errors are “Freudian slips.”
Neither work is particularly harmful so long as you don’t feel inclined to actually believe any of this stuff, I think. But if you do believe it, I suspect that the idea that all speech errors reveal the Inner Man is more likely to lead to actual damage to innocent bystanders than imaginative overinterpretation of dreams (which is liable to cause problems only to the actual believers.) It’s right up there with polygraphs and “recovered memory” crap.
We normal people (as opposed to Trumpodules or Faragerotics) rely on media not to mislead us deliberately over fact, and try to seek out reliable sources. This sort of thing poisons the wells, without even having the excuse of being aimed at people who aren’t interested in facts in the first place, as with Fox News or GB News.)
Sanewashing right there in 2012. I knew it wasn’t invented for Trump.
It’s QAnon: people must be hiding something, and at the same time they must be spelling it all out in “symbols” that
QTeller has “decoded”.@de
There might be some defence for this, as an occasional practice. In the heat of the moment, people do not always express themselves well. I am sure Guardian writers do not seek out “the average working man/woman” and then print his/her unedited and exact words on some emotive issue. I agree the interviewee, if not given a chance to vet the publshed text, should have ready access to legal redress.The “murderer” seems to have availed himself of this opportunity.
Yes, my original question about guidelines probably didn’t make it clear that I agree that some sort of cleaning up of the original speech is inevitable, even desirable; and it’s true enough that speech and writing really do differ significantly to the degree that simply trying to note down the original speech sounds would be impossible.
What Malcolm is trying on is a bad-faith attempt to leverage these real issues into a pretext for silently editorialising in what purports to be straight reporting. The real linguistic issues (even if she’d actually got the facts right) are just used for a faux-scientific piece of misdirection, like the name-dropping of Chomsky in the passage Kristian cited. (I wonder if Malcolm has also misrepresented Dahl’s paper, or if it really is junk science? I can imagine such a study being done properly in the right hands. However, as the book dates from 1981, it would necessarily antedate all the recent linguistic work which really has shed light on these matters, which would inevitably limit its value.)
So there is a real issue nevertheless, and I was kinda hoping that some respectable journalistic enterprises had come up with good-faith efforts to draw the right boundaries. (Mark Liberman’s posts suggest that, unfortunately, the answer is “yes, but they might as well not have bothered.”)
I wasn’t familiar with the surname Heren (and neither were my reference books); this site says: […]
That site needs to 1) proofread 2) not tell people they have a family crest based on their surname 3) not call an achievement of arms a family crest 4) quote relevant parts of sources in full—their source for the “meadow” origin also records other suggestions.
So while I’m laying down the law about things I know very little about—I’ve seen some unedited transcripts, notably of some famous scientists, and I agree that few people will want to read them. I also agree that anything between quotation marks should be something the speaker actually said, with only disfluencies edited out, and that paraphrasing can be useful.
I didn’t think Malcolm’s editing of the example quoted here (thanks to mollymooly) was that terrible, and I didn’t really see changes in “the tone, emphasis, and impact”. I was bothered by omission of factual points, especially that Stone had his “insight” after his first day of testimony.
So far I haven’t seen any mention in this thread of a point that I consider important: the potential for prejudice. If I get interviewed and I say something like [‘aŋənə] (as I’ve been known to), I’ll bet it will get printed as “I’m going to” because I’m a white person who speaks with standardish grammar. If a black person who consistently uses AAVE in the interview says [‘amə], will it get printed as “I’m going to”? If it’s printed as “I’ma” or some other spelling, is that mockery or deliberately making them look ignorant, which is what I read Malcolm as saying? Should the journalist consider the possibility that the interviewee’s AAVE is a deliberate choice, and that the interviewee would resent a “correction” of it, maybe as erasing their identity? I don’t have answers to those questions, but I do have the feeling that printing people’s non-standard utterances is much less seen as belittling now than it was in the last century.
The ideal solution would be to let the actual speaker decide, I suppose. Though actually asking them might come across as offensive in itself …
I suppose that if you’re treating AAVE as just another form of non-standard English, you ought, simply to be consistent, to normalise [amə] to “I’m going to.” If the speaker hasn’t actually expressed any opinion on the matter, that seems to me like the best default.
I was bothered by omission of factual points
There’s certainly a lot more to avoiding misrepresentation in journalism than appropriate use of inverted commas. Not only in omission of important facts, but the whole meta-question of what actually gets reported on at all. The bad guys are very good at making sure that even honest reporters concentrate most of their efforts on what the bad guys want to have discussed: good in itself, for them, and also crowds out discussion of issues they would like to see ignored. The whole ecosystem is much more hackable than most people realise. Destroying traditional media in the ways Facebook and Google do serves the same purpose. Fewer journalists with less resources. Keep the peasants ignorant …
I do think this particular issue is worth complaining about, though. Whatever some journalists may claim, putting a person’s words in quotes really does imply that they actually did say those words in that order, with minimal truly necessary changes. If you do that knowing that it’s not the case, you’re a liar, not a sophisticate or a realist. The fact that so many apparently decent journalists can’t see that is more worrying than these individual examples. More than ever, we need journalists who really do care about the facts being right.
The family name Heren is one of the oldest Anglo-Saxon names of Britain
Pah. Mere parvenus compared with us Haversedges. Also, tradesmen …
(This seems to be analogous to claims about such-and-such a modern language being particularly “ancient.”)
The ideal solution would be to let the actual speaker decide, I suppose. Though actually asking them might come across as offensive in itself …
Yes, I think the reporter’s rapport with the interviewee would have to be good in order to ask something like that, and a clue that the person was interested in such questions would help too.
I do think this particular issue is worth complaining about, though. Whatever some journalists may claim, putting a person’s words in quotes really does imply that they actually did say those words in that order, with minimal truly necessary changes. If you do that knowing that it’s not the case, you’re a liar, not a sophisticate or a realist.
And this doesn’t deprive journalists of their sensitivity and judgement. People do sometimes express themselves poorly or even say the opposite of what they meant, and if the journalist is sure that’s what happened (maybe because they checked), that’s when they paraphrase–or in some cases, maybe elicit another quote that might turn out better. Much would depend on whether it’s the hear-what-the-person-has-to-say or the uncover-the-ugly-truth kind of interview.
one philological note: the sentences in the passage Kristian brought that do not specifically refer to dahl or teller are repeated nearly verbatim in the Afterword to Journalist/Murderer.
in my own perhaps morally-dubious profession as a lawyer, I am actually subject to enforceable rules that in certain circumstances (certainly not all circumstances!) require me to affirmatively warn someone I might be talking to that despite the positive rapport and aura of trust and confidence I am hopefully inspiring they should know that I remain free to betray their trust and confidence in pursuit of someone else’s agenda.
one thing it seems to me malcolm seems to me to be doing in her insistance on moral indefensibility is a making a claim that journalists cannot be truly honest with their subjects. she never quite says so directly, but (to my ear, at least) seems to draw a corollary from that equating journalists with the other profession whose truthfulness has enforceable guidelines: cops, who (in the u.s.) have legal immunity from consequences for lying under almost all circumstances (and practical impunity in most of the exceptions). this almost-stated position – that the impossibility of complete honesty with their subjects absolves journalists from any need to pursue it – is a gift to the most deliberately manipulative members of the profession, especially those who use the fiction of objectivity as cover for their misrepresentations (pamela paul’s anti-trans screeds in the New York Times come to mind).
The Graun got a big plus in my book when they changed from saying climate sceptics to saying climate deniers, at least as official policy. I haven’t done a word count. This was several years back.
Danish public-funded media are quite happy to invite an actual expert in to outline how stupid the government’s latest fever dream is. They also invite the minister, who usually has more pressing matters in their calendar than defending a losing cause. That way they also don’t risk promising in the heat of the moment to change anything. Also one advantage of having 10+ parties in parliament is that you can usually find two subject spokespeople to disagree on camera without either of them being a screaming nutjob. That seems to be strategy two if there is a lack of photogenic experts.
Sanewashing right there in 2012.
Malcolm’s quote-rewriting falls far short of sanewashing — Malcolm’s interviewees weren’t insane.
I knew it wasn’t invented for Trump.
Indeed it wasn’t, it was invented for transhumanism.
So its original application is more to the Musks and Thiels.
That actually seems appropriate; I don’t think Trump’s rhetoric betokens insanity at all: it is well calculated to appeal greatly to his core base of misogynist racist fantasists, and (importantly) to trigger helpful responses from his critics.
Thiel and Musk, on the other hand, really believe in their Dark Enlightenment accelerationist hallucinations. To their credit: I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.
What was it that made The Big Lebowski a fountain of memes, comparable to The Wizard of Oz or The Princess Bride?