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Not cleaning up quotes: racist?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by YankeeFan, Sep 26, 2011.

  1. britwrit

    britwrit Well-Known Member

    Pretty sad to see the standard presidential stress and aging process taking effect.

    "I need a drink. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not in some pie-in-the-sky Neverland bar of the future. But now! Right now!"
     
  2. Flying Headbutt

    Flying Headbutt Moderator Staff Member

    For what it's worth, AP policy, especially when it comes to the president, is that there is NO cleaning up of quotes. There may be some exceptions for less important people, but when it comes to the president, it may as well be carved into rock and carried down by Moses.
     
  3. KJIM

    KJIM Well-Known Member

    Bad example. He trashed those as soon as he got down the mountain and had to go up for a writethru.

    I do think the President here was going for the dialect. You can't ignore that. It would have been incorrect to ignore that.

    And I never, ever would have noticed the "darkened room" adjective.
     
  4. Point of Order

    Point of Order Active Member

    I've thought about this. A lot. Deciding between complainin' and complaining is not cleaning up a quote. You go with "complaining" lest you find yourself heading down the slippery slope of writing everything anyone ever says completely phonetically like you're Mark Twain writing Huck Finn.

    The reason race comes into the discussion -- and I wouldn't go so far as to call the AP guy racist exactly -- is that people tend to normalize words that are spoken like they speak whether it be because of regional differences, racial-cultural differences, or whatever.

    If I hear Nick Saban say "I told ire guys at halftime 'we ah gonna go out 'ere and we ah gonna knock 'em offa tha line" I write "I told our guys at halftime 'we're going to go out there and we're going knock them off the line."

    Why? Again, because I'm not getting myself into a situation where I'm ciphering every quote I ever get for a phonetic spelling. The only argument for quoting the way the AP story quoted is that if the speaker spoke in a different dialect than he normally speaks purposefully for effect, then it is okay to quote him as such. But if you do that you need to explain that observation and justify the use of the dialectical quote.

    E.g. "Shake it off. Stop complainin'. Stop grumblin'. Stop cryin'," Obama said in an intentionally traditional African-American dialect to the CBC audience.

    In other words, if you want to go there -- if you're going to allude to the dialect in your quote -- you ought to have the balls to explain why you felt like it was necessary to do such. Otherwise, you're just trying to be a literary, and that doesn't work in news reporting.
     
  5. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    I'm with PoO.
     
  6. reformedhack

    reformedhack Well-Known Member

    President Obama, quoted in David Remnick's 2010 biography, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, acknowledges tweaking his dialect depending on the audience.

    "The fact that I conjugate my verbs and speak in a typical Midwestern newscaster's voice -- there's no doubt that this helps ease communication between myself and white audiences. And there's no doubt that when I'm with a black audience I slip into a slightly different dialect. But the point is, I don't feel the need to speak a certain way in front of a black audience. There's a level of self-consciousness about these issues the previous generation had to negotiate that I don't feel I have to."

    It's quoted in the Washington Post here -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/02/AR2010040201516.html -- and can be found elsewhere.

    Considering this, relative to the topic of this thread, I'd like to believe the AP reporter was simply trying to illustrate the scene with no underlying motive.
     
  7. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member


    Well said.
     
  8. TheHacker

    TheHacker Member

    @ Point of Order: An "intentionally traditional African-American dialect?"

    I'm not sure I like the sound of that phrase. That assumes there is such a thing. I get what you're saying and I agree with it, but I think it gets messy when you try to explain things too much.

    I do agree you can't phoneticize every quote. And you have to clean things up. There's a difference between watching the video of the speech and reading quotes in a news story. The presentation is different and it's going to strike people differently.

    Yesterday I heard Mike Ditka on the radio and every couple of sentences were prefaced with, "I mean." If you're writing a story, you hack those out.
     
  9. Point of Order

    Point of Order Active Member

    Hacker. Thats kind of my point as to why you don't do that. Gets very dicey when you start reading into dialect, so don't do it. But if you are going make a ballsy quote them just come right out and say what you were thinking when you decided to quote dialect.
     
  10. Mystery Meat II

    Mystery Meat II Well-Known Member

    Michael Lewis pointed out in one of his books that Jesse Jackson does much the same thing -- newscaster voice for the masses, a more soulful dialect for the African-American audience.
     
  11. KJIM

    KJIM Well-Known Member

    Who doesn't? I know when I return to my hometown, my redneck accent resurfaces. And when I covered hockey, I could speak Canadien! I also have a great Darija accent when around Moroccans.

    I think you have to acknowledge what he said. If you want to explain it, tha'ts good, but I couldn't tell you what an "intentionally traditional African-American dialect" is. I didn't hear the quote, but written out, it looks Southern. Not black or white, just Southern.
     
  12. dirtybird

    dirtybird Well-Known Member

    Doesn't the AP Style Guide explicitly say to use "going to" and "got to" instead of "gonna" and "gotta"? That hardly seems like NO cleaning of quotes.
     
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