Earlier this month, I wrote (somewhat tongue in cheek) about the way in which journalists are apt to quote literally what people of note are saying – complete with all the slips and repairs. Well, I’m currently re-reading Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (I had originally skimmed it thinking it to be a sort of psycholinguistics text book – how wrong I was!) and found an interesting piece in chapter 7 (Talking Heads) which starts with the reaction to the release of the transcripts of Nixon’s meetings in the White House:
Not everyone was shocked by the unintelligibility of transcribed speech. Journalists know all about it, and it is a routine practice to edit quotations and interviews heavily before they are published…
Journalists’ editing of conversations became a legal issue in 1983, when the writer Janet Malcolm published an unflattering New Yorker series about the psychoanalyst Jeffery Masson.
…
In a closely watched opinion, the majority [of Supreme Court Judges] defined a middle ground for journalists’ treatment of quotations. (Requiring them to publish quotes verbatim was not even considered.)…”deliberate alteration of the words uttered by a plaintiff does not equate with knowledge of falsity.”
Note – if you are ever reading a book on linguistics and think that the examples of branching are silly (the man by the lake on the hill with the ..), take a look at your own writing. In the first para above, I wrote (without thinking about it):
the reaction to the release of the transcripts of Nixon’s meetings in the White House
In summary – subjects can be skewered by literal quotations and certainly things have changed since Pinker wrote his book. I was thinking of delving into the New York Times’ archives to see if a trend could be measured. This seems like too much work, but here is the first quote I stumbled across, from May 26, 1912:
“Why, In Utah,” he said, “we could have stopped instructions for Taft but for a telegram sent by Senator Smoot at the last moment. As it is we will get four of the delegates when the time comes. I am positive of two and pretty sure of the other two.”
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