QUOTING CORRECTLY

What do these two quotes have in common?

‘Right now it can affect me, but that is indirect. It will never directly affect me because I do not want it that way. I will never have HIV in my body because I chose so.’


‘I know that HIV can affect me indirectly, but I will never have HIV in my body.’



They were said by the same person at the same time in the same place. But the two journalists who covered the story produced different versions of what was said for their newspapers. The first was published in the Weekend Observer (15 September 2007) and the second in the Times of Swaziland (13 September 2007).

The event was a public speech on HIV/AIDS given by the Swaziland Deputy Minister of Regional Development and Youth Affairs, Hlobsile Ndlovu at the annual Peace Corps youth conference on 12 September 2007.

So how was it that the two different versions came to be published? The answer, of course, is that someone got it wrong. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there, but maybe one reporter got it right and the other one didn’t. Or maybe they both got it wrong.

The issue of how to quote quotes correctly isn’t a new one. And it certainly isn’t one that is confined to Swaziland newspapers.

Seasoned journalists who are otherwise honest and trustworthy alter quotes all the time. They shouldn’t do it but they do. If you went to a newsroom and asked reporters why they do it, I suspect they would tell you something like this: they don’t want to make the people they are reporting on look silly because they speak in badly constructed sentences with poor grammar. Reporters might also say that sometimes they write what the interviewee meant to say rather than what they actually did say, thereby tidying up a slip of the tongue.

Bob Steele, of the US-based media watchdog organisation Poynter, has written about his own experiences of being quoted by journalists.

‘On occasion, I see a quote attributed to me that I’m pretty darned sure doesn’t match what I said. ’Sometimes my quote has proper grammar when I know I butchered the verb tense in the interview. The reporter cleaned me up.

‘Sometimes there’s a word in my quote that I wouldn’t use because I don’t even know its meaning. The reporter either wasn’t listening well or took bad notes. ’Sometimes my “quote” is a composite of several things I said at different times in the interview. The words may be accurate but the reporter is playing loose with the context, perhaps the writer’s way of tidying up my thoughts to tighten up the story.

'I’m in the camp that believes, “Quotes should accurately and authentically reflect the words used in an interview. If we start changing words inside quote marks, then we raise questions about all other quotes. We will increase the distrust factor about the veracity of our journalism.”’

The Washington Post, in the United States, which is probably one of the most respected newspapers in the world, has a very simple rule when it comes to quotes. Deborah Howell, the newspapers ombudsman (the person who deals with readers’ complaints) says, the Washington 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.’

I have written before about the need for newspapers to be accurate in their reporting and this need should extend to the accurate use of quotes.

Getting things right is important because readers must feel that they can trust their newspapers (or other news media) and the main way they do this by having confidence that the reports and articles in the newspapers are accurate.

If you look at the number of errors that generally appear in newspapers in Swaziland it is not unreasonable to suspect that the real reason why quotes are incorrectly reported is that reporters are not very good at taking down notes accurately and have no skills in shorthand note taking.

Many reporters at the Times of Swaziland get around this problem by not using direct quotes at all. That’s certainly one way to make sure you don’t misquote people, but it tends to mean that their reports in the newspaper are lifeless. So, not quoting at all is not the best solution. Journalism is a craft and if people are to call themselves journalists they need to learn the craft skills and one of the most important for reporters is note taking.

My tip: If you don’t have the chance to learn shorthand skills at least take a tape recorder with you when you go out on a job.