Wide Respect for Sanctity of the Spoken Word : Most Newspapers Have Strict Rules on Quotes

The federal court of appeals ruling Friday that the press has a right to change quotations in stories and sometimes even fabricate them may be one case in which judges are granting freedoms to the press that most journalists don’t want.

At least they don’t want them now that the tape recorder has come along.

If quotes don’t mean anything, said Bill Kovach, director of the Neiman Foundation for Journalism, “you might as well eliminate the definition of a quotation mark.”

The policy at the Washington Post, said deputy managing editor Peter Silberman, is “you do not change quotes and you certainly do not make up quotes.”

The ruling handed down Friday in the libel trial of New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm vs. Jeffrey M. Masson held that it is not libelous to deliberately alter quotations, as long as “the fabricated quotations” do not change the meaning of what someone said. And if the meaning is unclear, fabrication is acceptable if the made-up quotes are “rational interpretations of ambiguous remarks.” The opinion related only to cases involving public figures.

But an informal survey of major newspapers suggested that the standard the Malcolm case seemed to lay down is quite a bit lower than the standards of most newspapers. Indeed, in his dissent, federal appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski said it was lower than the New Yorker’s own self-declared standards, outlined in a 1984 memo by editor William Shawn that stipulated “we do not create conversations.”

Most other publications agree. “We believe if it is in quotes it should be what the person said,” said Janet Chusmir, editor of the Miami Herald.

The one exception is a “grand tradition of saving people from their grammatical lapses,” said Jack Fuller, executive editor of the Chicago Tribune.

It’s Rare Now

But generally even that is now rare. Most editors interviewed said that their policies are to paraphrase an ungrammatical quote or use only the relevant sections in quotation marks.

The Los Angeles Times policy is the same. “When we use quote marks, what’s inside those quote marks should be what the person said,” said Shelby Coffey III, editor of The Times. “Obviously there are times when a reporter needs to condense a conversation. In that case, a summary or indirect quotation should be used with fairness in mind.”

The one problem with these policies, editors said, is that altered quotations can be difficult to detect, but when one Times reporter was found to have fabricated quotes, the reporter was dismissed.

“The law may prohibit certain things but our standards ought to be our own standards and they ought to be quite apart from the bare legal minimums,” said Fuller of the Chicago Tribune.

Not all of the major publications were always so careful about the sanctity of the spoken word.

Protected Politicians

Politicians once expected their quotes to be cleaned up, and reporters regularly protected them. Reporters who covered Congress in the 1950s, when many congressmen did not yet have press secretaries, said members often would simply explain how they had voted and then trust the reporter to write a statement for them.

The advent of the tape recorder and the television camera changed all that, drastically altering the attitude among journalists toward quotation.

And in the process, it helped make the relationship between reporters and officials more contentious.

Columnist Mike Royko recalls what happened when he started applying the tape recorder to politicians in Chicago.

“I used to get easy columns by getting a tape recorder and going to press conferences of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and then quoting his reponses. His press secretary finally said if I kept coming there they would stop holding press conferences.”

Eventually, Royko said, the press corps voted and asked him to stop coming, which he did.

When he started taking a tape recorder to City Council meetings, Royko said that “for a while Chicagoans thought I was kidding. They didn’t know aldermen talked that way.”

Some of the fondest quotes in the pre-tape-recorded era got a little help.

Longtime former New York Times sportswriter Leonard Koppett recalls the real story about the day Leo Durocher allegedly said, “Nice guys finish last.”

A reporter sitting with Durocher before a game had asked him why he couldn’t be nicer.

Durocher, who was managing the Dodgers, pointed across to Giants manager Mel Ott. “There’s Mel Ott,” Durocher really said, Koppett was told later by the reporters there. “He’s a nice guy, and he’s in last place.”

In print it became nice guys finish last, and Durocher, far from quibbling, adopted it.

A Tricky Area

Sports remains a tricky area for reporters. “It is inherent in the activity that quotes have to be cleaned up because of the bearish language,” Koppett said.

The sources, too, are often young and unsophisticated.

But even here, where players were once protected from their mistakes, their misstatements now fill sports pages with controversy.

The tape recorder has not only made the print media’s use of quotes more precise. It has also made what is printed in newspapers more vulgar.

During Watergate, the New York Times had to abandon its longstanding policy against allowing four-letter words to appear in its pages when it started quoting the tapes of the office discussions of President Richard M. Nixon.

‘Faithful to the Word’

“We talked about it for days,” said Kovach, then in the Times Washington bureau. Ultimately, the curse words “appeared in the New York Times for the first time in order to be faithful to the word.”

The sanctity of the word is so great that journalists now have a term for it: The sound bite.

During the filming of “Eight Men Out,” about the Chicago White Sox scandal, a reporter asked longtime Chicago radio personality and journalist Studs Terkel, who was appearing in the film, if he could have a bite. Terkel said sure, where? Right here, the reporter answered.

Terkel thought he meant lunch. The reporter meant he wanted a quote.