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"We edited a bit around some quotes"… This passes for journalism?

• schainks 13y ago
  My sentiment exactly. If journalists want to help people through their craft with integrity, these kinds of modifications should be transparently pointed out to the reader. Oh, wait! There's MLA formatting for that: "We can't make . . . women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years."
• GrinningFool 13y ago
  This is OK in journalism - but there is very specific protocol around it that makes it OK. If you remove text, you indicate that you've done so, like so: "No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23" should have become "No, the problem is ... women are not by the time get to 23" Thus indicating to the readers that some information had been removed. It's still a bit of an ugly trick, but it's acceptable because it tells the reader that this isn't the full, in-context quote. As I've said in previous comments, this is what can happen when people without journalistic training present themselves as journalists. They publish unaware of these rules. Particularly the subtle, nuanced rules - like inserting an ellipsis when removing text from a quote, or using brackets to indicate inserting text for clarity that the source didn't provide. And so "the problem is women are not by the time they get to 23" blows up into a big firestorm -- first because the public trusted and assumed that these rules were followed, then later when we discovered that they were not. It's unclear to me why they didn't just say "Oops, we did selectively quote and it appears we didn't handle it well. Our bad." It does appear to be an honest mistake made in ignorance.