When two news sources asked to approve their quotes and the article before it was slated to print in last week’s issue, it became clear to me that the line between the press and press releases is becoming difficult to discern. The practice of allowing news sources to read and edit quotations as a condition for an interview is growing into a new standard and getting out of hand.
Our newspaper cannot stand to both claim transparency and, somehow, remain elusive. So the Campus editorial board is settling once and for all whether to eradicate quote approvals as a standard practice at the newspaper.
If this policy changes, writers for the Campus will no longer forward quotes to news sources for review or edit, except in rare situations that require further accuracy and clarification. News sources will either commit to being on the record or off. To introduce a string of entangling pre-conditions to an interview is to obscure what should be the simple act of asking a question and getting a response. More and more, writers find where they sit turn over from an interview table to a bargaining table, trading access to interviews for quote approvals. They are forking editorial control over to the wrong people.
Quote revisions are at complete odds with our mission of honest reporting. Not only do these revisions shroud the most meaningful parts of a quote with generics, but presenting a revised version of what the reporter initially stood witness to as entirely original is an act of dishonesty. New York Times columnist David Carr says it best: “The first draft of history should not be rewritten by the people who make it.”
Often, that history comes back revised with quotations that enjoy the privileges and authority of full attribution without actually showing how it was doctored and by whom. “When the quotes are sanitized, then delivered intact with full attribution, the public has no way of knowing what the concealed deal was,” former CBS news anchor Dan Rather wrote in a CNN piece.
In the past two years, the New York Times and even peer college newspapers like the Kenyon Collegian and the Harvard Crimson banned quote approvals as a standard practice. This policy is necessary for the Campus.
The distinction between the truth and the truth in its best lighting is becoming increasingly vague. An equally insidious and growing practice is emailing interview questions and answers. To conduct an interview over email is to lose the back-and-forth, real-time follow-up questions that reveal the most honest and human parts of a story: laughter, nervousness, pause, sadness and surprise. If anodyne quotes continue to be manufactured on an assembly line of keystrokes over email, the stories that go down in history will go down drained of its human properties — and everything historical is stuck to script.
This policy move may drive away people we want to interview. The sound-byte-obsessed media culture writ large by BuzzFeed and Twitter has brought out the most defensive parts in a person when speaking to a reporter. I’ve had the entire economics department at the College — upwards of 11 professors — refuse to speak to me before referring me to a designated spokesperson for, lest we forget, an academic department — out of this very fear of what’s on-the-record may turn into what’s out-of-context. I’ve had an administrator at the College rewrite entire Q&A transcripts — interviews published verbatim — for the sake of sounding more sophisticated. When we put articles in the hands of those most concerned with keeping up with appearances, we are putting it in the wrong hands. Here at the Campus, we are in the business of writing fair, honest news — not press releases.
That is not to say errors have never made it to our pages. Our very own editors have been misquoted, and we have gotten facts wrong. We are human, we are students with classes and participants in other organizations, but we don’t let ourselves get away with mistakes. When errors warrant correction, we print a corrections box on the opinions page, and time-stamped corrections appear on online articles. Journalism is not our profession, but I’ve spent many nights in the newsroom, standing witness to the fact that we treat it as our own.
And we are doing more. We are coordinating ethical reporting workshops taught by section editors and guest lecturers to train writers, new and old. We are expanding our copy editing section. We are forming a fact-checking department. New to this year is the position of standards editor. All this is to ensure that inaccuracies are caught and prevented — not apologized for. Each editor oversees their section and puts into it their own personality and editorial judgment, but it is my hope that earnest adherence to the same ethics and policies is what binds us as a newspaper — editors, writers, sources and readers.
As a co-host of The Campus Voice, I know a news story is entirely different premeditated than it is when done live. I also know that the difference is not just between two stories, but also between two histories. After all, what kind of lives would we be living if Richard Nixon took back the moment he accidently told the truth? “Frankly, I don’t want to have in the record discussions we’ve had in this room on Watergate,” Nixon said in the very tapes that incriminated him. What kind of lives would we be living if then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney could redact what he let slip: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” Or if a journalist herself could erase ever referencing television producer Shonda Rhimes as an “Angry Black Woman.” We would not only be living different lives, but in a cover-up of lies.
At the heart of it, journalism is about telling the truth. When someone asks a reporter to unsee what she saw, they are revising the truth. They are revising history. And if the stories we’re telling are less true, less candid and less emotive, then our stories will cease to resemble anything of life.
