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Blog of Adam Daifallah -- author, journalist, law student. Lover of politics, writing, golf, curling, fitness, fashion, bacon and maple products -- not necessarily (but probably) in that order. Partisan of the Anglosphere. Contact me via email at adam@daifallah.com. This summer I am joined by Keir Wilmut and Omar Soliman.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Sloppy quoting at The Globe & Mail
In a fawning profile of muckraking journalist Seymour Hersh in Saturday's Globe, the paper's new Washington correspondent, Alan Freeman, gets an important quote from American foreign policy hawk Richard Perle wrong. It's impossible to know whether the slight was intentional or not; we'll see if there's a correction printed in the coming days.
Freeman writes:
Such digging often puts him [Hersh] on the wrong side of establishment figures. Last year, he exposed the questionable business dealings of Richard Perle, an important Bush adviser, forcing him to resign as head of the Defence Policy Board. Mr. Perle lashed out, calling Mr. Hersh "the closest thing America has to a terrorist," and vowing to sue the journalist for slander. The lawsuit never came.
But Perle did not say that. The actual quote, if Freeman had checked the CNN transcript, was:
"Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly."
(Emphases added)
It is obvious that Perle was speaking sarcastically, and that he was referring to Hersh's penchant for character assassination and his frequent reliance on sources from only one side of a story. But by removing the "American journalism" part from the quote, (and by not inserting ellipses, ie. "...", which would have been poor journalism but still stylistically acceptable) Freeman made Perle's quote look worse than it actually was.
Musings: Holding the Globe to account.
(A footnote: While it was not directly relevant to this profile and therefore did not technically require mention, Freeman, and most of the media, in fact, never reported that Perle was cleared of any wrongdoing after a Pentagon inspector general investigation into the "questionable business dealings" Hersh "exposed.")
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 9:21 AM
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