Misquoted? Bring your own tape recorder

MORE AND more news subjects have been complaining, to me at least, about being misquoted, and some of them say that not infrequently the news media don’t allow a word in from them and, if at all they do, they make sure the final word is theirs—that is, the last word that gets in their paper or broadcast program and gets out to the public.

Obviously I can’t be sure how valid each complaint is and don’t have an idea of the extent of the problem; I have been shown cases (and some do look valid), but I have not inquired enough to be able to determine where the fault lies. In any case, I offer the complainer advice that should prove decisive: Bring your own tape recorder and keep it going through the interview.

“Too bold a challenge, and rather antagonistic,” one complainer says.

Then keep the little machine out of sight, if you are prepared to risk being seen as cowardly, and you will be seen, indeed you will have to reveal yourself, as such at the first instance of redress you decide to demand for being misquoted.

“It’s like laying a gun on the table.”

Right, but only to match the one laid there first by your inquirer, who, by the way, sees you as some sort of adversary, especially in sensitive cases, say, if you happen to be a party to a controversy.

The game is not for the faint-hearted: The public whom you both—news media and subject—owe the truth in its interest will not care if you shoot each other with tape recorders so long as it gets it.

If indeed misquotation is any serious problem, I don’t quite understand, not having found myself ever a part of it—not even when I didn’t take the interview down or did it with pencil and paper. These were the simple weapons issued me as a reporter in those distant, simple years, but they have continued to serve me well to this day; the tape recorder do come into service for long interviews, but all the time it is on I still take notes. I have been sued twice in all my forty years of practice, but even then as an editor, a secondary party, and beaten both suits at pre-trial.

How have I been so lucky? I have two non-secrets.

First: I go to an interview or editorial inquiry knowing what to look for, what to ask, because I have done enough preliminarily—found enough about the issue and about my interviewee relative to the issue.

Second: Equipped now to pay well-informed attention, I take care to get my interviewee’s intended meanings right more than the words themselves. Getting what the interviewee means is capturing his words in the proper context. Words gotten down right don’t make the context; words put right do.

I may be found wanting—oh, and have I been found wanting!—but not misquoting.