Lost in Translation: Journalistic Integrity

Howard Bryant surely could not have anticipated the reaction he would spark when he went about the simple act of cleaning up a quote—a standard practice for many journalists, especially those involved in sports writing such as himself. Little did he know however, that the unaltered version of the quote would run in a story right next to it, catching a few readers’ attention, and quickly becoming the flagship example in the ensuing debate on whether or not it is ethical to tamper with what appears within the ever sacred quotation marks.

While Bryant’s changes to the quote weren’t exactly major from his viewpoint, others deemed it a grievous broach of journalistic protocol and blatant violation of ethics. Such journalists, like Deborah Howell view even the slightest change to the words within the quote as a violation of ethics.

“Simply put, quotes should be sound and authentic.” She says.

This goes right along with the Washington Post’s policy that "when we put a source's words inside quotation marks, those exact words should have been uttered in precisely that form."

To be fair, in Bryant’s defense, he states, “I clean up his language to not embarrass him…what’s fair is fair.”

But is it really?

By my way of seeing things it hardly appears to be fair for all parties involved. It’s not fair to the person whose quote that’s been altered, and it is surely not fair to the readers who will end up reading it.

In the case of Clinton Portis, the alteration of his quote provides an added element of complexity because it brings the topic of race into the question. While Bryant claims he only changed the grammar of the quote, I claim that by merely changing the grammar, he did in fact change not only the meaning of the quote, but it’s intended message as well.
While the unaltered quote: “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” is clearly far from grammatically correct, it represents a distinct, conscious choice on the part of Portis to speak a certain way. It is only right then, to portray the quote in it’s original, unaltered form. Altering a quote for simple fear of how readers might perceive it and its speaker simply provides an injustice to both the speaker and the reader and inserts the reporter’s bias into the story…not exactly a good thing.

While this alteration may be done out of a journalist’s hope to avoid highlighting a stereotype and embarrassing the source, it is still an infringement on the reader’s right to interpret and attach meaning and/or judgment to a quote on their own. Reporters simply need to cut out the practice of altering quotes altogether, there is simply no excuse for it. Altering quotes merely provides a disservice to all those involved and degrades the strong base of ethics from which good journalism draws its credibility