All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Dead men tell no tales. But the tales told about them stir incredible controversy.

In this space, we’ve discussed how to cover recently deceased people – from Merv Griffin to Boston firefighters – and there don’t seem to be any hard and fast rules.

But like most things in the media, we tend to sense by feel when things are inappropriate.

Which brings us to the Sean Taylor story.

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Deborah Howell, the Washington Post’s ombudsman (ombudswoman?), came down from Mount Sinai with a new commandment last week:

Thou Shalt Not Tweak.

Howell was informed that a Post sports writer had made some adjustments to a Redskins player’s quote to make it grammatically correct. Her take?

My view: Quotes should not be changed. If coaches or athletes are routinely "cleaned up," that should stop. Simply put, quotes should be and sound authentic. And The Post needs to set this particular record straight... The rough draft of history is still history.

I’m journalistically agnostic about quote-cleansing. Who among us hasn’t ever parsed a verb incorrectly? Isn’t a journalist’s first duty to convey how the world is, rather than amend it? How many “like”s or “uhm”s or “yeah”s do we toss into a sentence that, when transcribed, make us sound like Jeff Spicoli? Isn’t this the equivalent of a photographer touching up a photo? I can see it both ways.(Don't envy me my cognitive dissonance.)

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