Those are not my words. I'm a fan of journalists, although they sometimes disappoint me. My title is a translation of the (French) title of a blog entry by Pascale Riché, the Washington correspondent of the (French) newspaper Libération: "A bas les journalistes!"
M. Riché is down on his own profession because he experienced the distressing effect of being the person selectively quoted rather than the person selectively quoting. His entry is worth reproducing in full, with an English translation (by me, and thus suspect).
Une journaliste du Washington Post m'interviewe au téléphone sur notre "Block Party" annuelle (cela consiste à bloquer la rue et à se relaxer sur la chaussée pendant une demi-journée). Je lui réponds longuement, je lui parle de ma découverte de l'importance des communautés aux Etats-Unis, je cite Toqueville, je fais une digression sur le lien créé par les enfants dans ce bloc et plus largement dans la société américaine...
A journalist from the Washington Post interviewed me on the telephone about our annual Block Party (this consists of blocking the street and relaxing on the pavement for half a day). I responded to her at length, I told her about my discovery of the importance of community in the U.S., I cited Tocqueville, I made a digression about the bond created by children on the block and more broadly in American society...
Ce qu'il en reste dans le journal? Cela:
"Her neighbor, Pascale Riche, pulled all the tables from his house and lined them up in the street, so everyone could dine together banquet-style.
"It was perfect," Riche says. "I'm French, and in France we like to have conversation around a nice dinner."What remained from all this in the paper? The following:
"Her neighbor, Pascale Riche, pulled all the tables from his house and lined them up in the street, so everyone could dine together banquet-style.
"It was perfect," Riche says. "I'm French, and in France we like to have conversation around a nice dinner.J'imagine retrospectivement ce qui a défilé dans sa tête pendant qu'on parlait: "Qu'il arrête un peu de me gonfler avec sa sociologie de bazar... Quand est-ce qu'il va me dire qu'il est Français et qu'il aime la bouffe... Ah ça y est, il accouche!"
Le pire, c'est qu'à sa place, j'aurais peut-être retenu la même citation idiote. Ma voisine Ruth m'a dit hier soir : "Comme ça, tu sais désormais ce que les gens que tu interroges pensent de tes articles!"I imagine in retrospect what went on in her head while we talked: "I wish he'd stop blathering on with his pop sociology... When is he going to tell me that he's French and that he loves food... Ah, there it is, he finally came out with it!"
The worst thing is that in her place, I would perhaps have kept the same idiotic quotation. My neighbor Ruth said to me yesterday evening: "So now you know what the people that you inverview think of your articles!"
Here's the WaPo story in question: "Summer, Time to Close Down The Block And Party", by Julia Feldmeier, 6/21/2005.
This example is from a feature on block parties rather than from news articles on a sports championship, but the situation is the same one that I described in a recent post on the ritual role of material from interviews in stories on the NBA finals. The journalist knows what (s)he wants to write, and what sort of facts and quotes are needed in support, and therefore manipulates the person interviewed so as produce suitable copy -- in this case mainly by selecting a few suitable fragments from a long interview. At least, that's Pascale's professional opinion about what happened.
In my experience -- both personal and second-hand -- science reporting often works pretty much the same way. The reporter may not approach an interview with the idea of learning more about the topic, much less providing an accurate characterization of the views of the person interviewed, but rather with the goal of getting suitable quotes to slot into a narrative that is already more or less in place.
[Blog link via email from Chris Waigl of Serendipity]
Posted by Mark Liberman at June 27, 2005 12:41 AM