LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT-CHECKERS AND EDITORS:
● Shot:
I do not record. I’ve never recorded. I’m a very fast note-taker. When someone kind of says the “it” thing that I have really wanted, I don’t start scribbling right away. I have an almost photographic memory and so I wait a beat or two while they’re onto something else, and then I write down the previous thing they said. Because you don’t want your subject to get nervous about what they just said.
—“How I Get It Done: Merchants of Truth author Jill Abramson,” New York magazine’s “The Cut,” today.
● Chaser:
So, when you sit down for an interview (unless it’s live), you’re putting yourself, like Homer, at the mercy of the editors. Usually they’re honest, but not always. But there’s a remedy now, with technology being what it is. If I were a candidate, I think I’d bring my own camera to interviews, shoot the whole thing and post the unedited raw video on the Web.
—“Bring Your Own Camera,” Glenn Reynolds, the New York Post, after Charlie Gibson’s deceptively edited interview with Sarah Palin, September 13, 2008. (At the very least, bring an audio recorder to a print interview.)
● Hangover:
The web is abuzz after a quote from the New York Times’s future executive [now of course former — Ed] editor, Jill Abramson, in a Times news story on her appointment was missing in an updated version of the piece.
Abramson was quoted by Jeremy Peters on Thursday as saying “In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” In later versions published online, the quote had been removed.
* * * * * * * *
Of the quote’s removal, National Review’s Jay Nordlinger wrote late Thursday: “That’s a tiny bit strange, isn’t it? I mean, Abramson’s words were not exactly scrubbable, or scrub-worthy.” In a follow-up, Taranto wrote that the editing process was the likely culprit for the quote’s removal, but added: “It’s obvious that an editorial decision was made to ‘rectify’ a quote that made the Times look foolish.”
—“NYT quote removal sparks web buzz,” the Politico, June 03, 2011.