When journalists lose their way

Even before I retired from the newspaper business after some three decades as a reporter, I could see that journalism was taking some unfortunate turns.

As budgets shrank and belts tightened, newspapers placed less emphasis on hard news, including the coverage of state government, which was my beat for almost all of my career. This was troublesome because the meaningful action in politics - the stuff that most keenly affects people’s day-to-day lives - usually takes place in state capitals, not in Washington. (Health-care reform being an obvious exception.) Fewer state house reporters means less oversight, making it easier for politicians to engage in the sneaky shenanigans they so love, with less risk of exposure.

Then there was the dawn of the Internet, which ushered in newspaper web sites and a resulting sense of urgency to get the news out fast. Gone were the good old days when newspaper reporters took pride in taking the time to thoroughly report a story before writing it, setting us apart from headline-oriented radio and TV newscasts. Posting constant updates online became the norm, even if such snippets of news turned out to be shallow and incomplete. I understood the need for this, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. 

Even when the outlook seemed especially bleak, though, it never occurred to me back then that I’d live to see a development that has further undermined the old-school journalism I knew and loved. Amazingly, it turns out some prominent and reputable news organizations are now doing something no self-respecting reporter would have considered doing back in the day: allowing sources to screen their own quotes before they appear in print.

This practice, which is coming under belated scrutiny, is known as “quote approval” in journalistic circles. It turns out many reporters covering the presidential campaign, for example, allow sources to edit their own quotes. Some of the news organizations that have agreed to this include Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Reuters, The Huffington Post and even The New York Times.

As a result, New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters wrote recently, “quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.”

Back when the world was young, part of my job was to make sure that I always got quotes right. If, after the fact, an angry source was embarrassed by his own remarks as they appeared in the newspaper, that was his problem, not mine, so long as I had not misquoted him or taken his remarks out of context.

My sources probably would have changed quotes more than 50 percent of the time if given half a chance. Usually, that was because they did not express themselves as well as they would have liked. At other times, they deluded themselves into believing that they never actually said whatever moronic thing they had, in fact, told me.

That’s why "quote approval" is such a stupid journalistic innovation - it robs news stories of their spontaneity, color, punch and honesty.

Here's a hypothetical example. Let's suppose a state legislator called a governor "ignorant and dangerous" while being interviewed by a reporter who wanted to use that quote but had to run it by the legislator first. Once the legislator saw himself about to be quoted using such blunt language, he might nix the quote and substitute softer language, even though the original quote was an accurate reflection of what he said and what he believes.

So the quote falls by the wayside, the story gets watered down, the reporter becomes frustrated and the reader loses out. The only winner here is the source. That's not how journalism is supposed to work, and it's why this concept is remarkably, inexcusably and dangerously . . . stupid.