MWPRInsight: The Need for Media Training for ALL Professional Athletes

Quote, Unquote
The Washington Post
By Deborah Howell

Sunday, August 12, 2007; Page B06

When you read a quote in The Post, is what's between the quotation marks exactly what the person said? Post policy says it should be, but it ain't necessarily so.
Several readers of an early edition of the July 28 Sports section noticed different versions of the same quote from Redskins running back Clinton Portis in a story by Howard Bryant and a column by Mike Wise. In Bryant's story, Portis said: "I don't know how anybody feels. I don't know how anybody's thinking. I don't know what anyone else is going through. The only thing I know is what's going on in Clinton Portis's life." Wise quoted him as saying: "I don't know how nobody feel, I don't know what nobody think, I don't know what nobody doing, the only thing I know is what's going on in Clinton Portis's life."

David Lapan of Alexandria wrote: "Why did Bryant feel the need to 'clean up' Portis's language while Wise presumably didn't? Most importantly, how did Post editors miss the incorrect use of quotation marks?"

Scot French, a University of Virginia history professor, noted that the ungrammatical version of the quote had been changed to match the cleaned-up version by the time it was published on washingtonpost.com. "Does the identity (pro athlete) or status (public vs. private figure) of the subject affect the decision on what to leave raw and what to clean up? . . . I ask this as a professional historian who has long relied on journalistic accounts as 'the first rough draft of history.' "

The Post's policy couldn't be clearer: "When we put a source's words inside quotation marks, those exact words should have been uttered in precisely that form."

So Bryant didn't follow the policy, but he said he had never heard of it. To make things worse, Wise's verbatim quote, caught on tape, was changed to agree with Bryant's.

Bryant, who just left The Post for ESPN, thinks the policy is wrong. "For me, having covered athletes for 15 years, I've always felt conscious and uncomfortable about the differences in class, background and race -- I'm an African American -- and in terms of the people who are doing the speaking and the people who are doing the writing. I really don't like to make people look stupid, especially when I understand what they're saying."

Full Article by Deborah Howell -
Quote, Unquote - washingtonpost.com