Discussion for article #230537
“They Still Don’t Care–They Ain’t Never Gon’ Care”
Was it really necessary to quote her accent, TPM?
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I think it’s okay here. For those of us who have watched her and respected her grace, felt her grief … isn’t this the most genuine and heart-wrenching thing she could have said?
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Her accent is not newsworthy. Its only purpose is to emphasize her grammar.
And your point is… ?
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The duty of the media is to accurately report what was said. Those were Ms. McSpadden’s actual words. To paraphrase what she said (which is what a re-write would be) would be highly improper. Direct quotes are what a responsible journalist does.
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Having been in the business for a while now, I can say it was always standard practice to “clean up” people’s quotes a bit to avoid calling undue attention to the sort of minor deviations from standard English people make for all kinds of reasons. You might quote them with the deviations intact if it were relevant to the story somehow. Today it’s more common to have video of what the person said, as we do here. In that case it’s hard to do anything but simply render the quote as you hear it—that traditional “cleaning up” could backfire and seem condescending. It’s a trickier call than it might seem.
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You and Anti are making valid points… but IMO Mr. Love’s issue has Nothing to do with the item TPM is relating here… yet we always seem to get sidetracked so easily… sigh
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No, a cleaning up of vernacular text is neither rewrite nor paraphrase. Both terms involve changing the MEANING of the spoken line. If this comment appeared in any of the magazines I’ve edited, I would not have hesitated to make it read: “They still don’t care. They aint never gonna care.”
The meaning has not changed. The vernacular has not been wildly cleaned up in any kind of condescending way. It is still very much the sentence that McSpadden said, without the insistence that she be transcribed syllable by syllable.
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I suppose and hope it goes without saying that we can talk about how you render a quote like Ms. McSpadden’s as a technical question and still be aware, as human beings, that this decision has caused her terrible pain. That’s ultimately what drives your effort to be accurate, respectful, and sensitive in the way you communicate things. Nobody is a severer media critic than me but real professionals, and there are many of them, think harder about this kind of thing than people realize.
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I simply disagree. When I read it, I heard her grief, not her accent or grammar.
Just keeping it real.
I realize to some it may seem like nitpicking, but the media cleans up quotes all the time. When they don’t and then even emphasize it in a headline, it really stands out. Whether it was intentional or not (and I prefer to give the editor/writer the benefit of the doubt), it stands out as highlighting the speaker’s lack of sophistication. That’s why I made the comment. The emphasis should be on her loss, her anger, her sadness, and the lack of justice – not on her grammar.
“…They still don’t care…”
They shot him 12 times, and left him in the street. They determined it was the correct way for government to act. Conservatives are pleased.