[governance] how to un-digg?

[KovenRonald at aol.com]

Dear All --

I respectfully disagree that journalists have any obligation to submit texts 
beforehand to interviewees.

In fact, doing so -- submitting in effect to a form of prior censorship -- 
would be grounds for dismissal at major news outlets where I have worked.

It is standard procedure for politicians to say when a statement later proves 
to be embarassing that they were misquoted or quoted "out of context." That 
can happen, of course. But in most cases of which I've been aware, that's just 
a copout by the speaker. The "quoted out of context" defense automatically 
produces sniggers amongst journalists.

I had a case in which the late Shah's sister publicly denied having said 
something to me that prompted a former business partner to claim he had been 
cheated by her. There was a lawsuit over it. Her lawyer backed off when my lawyer 
produced my tape recording in which she repeated the statement twice. 

I even had a US ambassador complain once that I had too uncritically 
reproduced exactly what he had said in a press briefing and that I should have stepped 
back from what it was he was saying. 

Nobody is ever happy with what the reporter writes because the reporter never 
writes exactly what the source would have written. The problem is sometimes 
that a generalist reporter is not going to be expert in the source's field. It 
is then the source's responsbility in dealing with a non-specialist journalist 
to be clear and precise. But the problem for the source is also that the 
reporter is not in the business of grinding the source's axes for him or her. And 
a good thing, too.

Public figures will keep saying that their thoughts or meanings were betrayed 
by journalistic incompetents. It's the looselipped pol's easy way out.

Rony Koven


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