Say a newspaper reporter is interviewing a witness to a car accident or some such, and the witness happens to be a person whose English skills rival that of a bucket of week old Taco Bell. Do journalists have the right to edit the interviewee’s quotes to make them grammatically correct? I’ve never read “I dunt seen these three fellows who was mighty doped up and thems wasn’t driven their cars too good and they dunt swerved themselves right into that there telephone pole.” Is that because the journalists choose not to interview these in-duh-viduals, or do they just grammatify their comments?
Keep in mind the difference between
A witness to the accident, Billy Joe Jim Sue Bob, stated that the car swerved into a telephone pole.
and
BJJSB said, “Well, them there boys done swerved and damned if they didn’t hit themselves a pole.”
They’re saying the same thing, no? Journalism is a lot about delivery.
There’s different ways around it, but that’s one of the ones I’ve seen/used.
Journalists do edit direct quotes to correct for correctness, sentence fragments that don’t lead anywhere, etc. IIRC, this practice has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Basically, most people (except for professional politicians, etc.) would sound like idiots if raw spoken words were recorded verbatim.
Arjuna34
Sports reporters do this frequently. Most athletes aren’t particularly eloquent.
As mentioned above, most people don’t wish to appear in print sounding like an idiot.
I’m a sportswriter. I do tweak interviews a little bit. If someone says "Joe Smith is a guy that … " I’ll go ahead and change it to "Joe Smith is a guy who … " and stuff like that. Obviously doesn’t change the meaning. Hell, some of the kids I interview will tell me “Hey, make me look smart, would you?”
If a guy I interview is a jerk, though, I won’t afford him any such tweaking – I’ll let him sound like an idiot. Such is my awesome power.
Several years ago, Roger Clemens threw a hissy fit about reporters mis-quoting him. In reponse, The Boston Herald printed his exact comments, verbatim, with every grammatical mistake, slip of the tongue, and each errr, um, like, and y’know set down just as he said it. Made him look like an absolute idiot (which may well have been an accurate portrayal, but that’s a subject for another forum). I don’t recall hearing Clemens make that particular complaint again.
–sublight.
I’m a reporter, too, and I will occasionally tweak grammar. But you want to be careful not to change the content or meaning of the quote.
Getting direct quotes exactly accurate is apparently hard even for the big boys. I often read both Detroit newspapers daily, and I frequently notice that each will use a direct quote from the same person at the same press conference, but their quotes aren’t word-for-word exactly the same.
Another tool reporters will employ is an indirect quote, without quotation marks. It conveys the meaning of the interviewee’s words without using them. From the OP’s example quote, a reporter might write:
A witness said the car, containing three passengers, swerved on the roadway and hit a utility pole.
(A reporter would not use the portion of the quote describing them as “doped-up,” because it’s potentially libelous. The witness couldn’t make the definitive determination that the occupants were under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Hell, we have to be careful when COPS tell us stuff like that.)