No wonder people hate journalists for misquoting them and using them and looking down on them. Here's one of us who says, yeah, we do do that. So What? Get over it.The title -- "It doesn't matter that journalists misquote everyone" -- pretty much says it all:
The reason that everyone thinks journalists misquote them is that the person who is writing is the one who gets to tell the story. No two people tell the same story.
[. . .]
Journalists who think they are telling "the truth" don't understand the truth. We each have our own truth. When you leave out details, you might leave out what is unimportant to you but very important to someone else, and things start feeling untrue to the person who wishes you included something else.
[. . .]
So everyone feels misquoted because people say 20 or 30 sentences for every one sentence that a journalist prints. It's always in the context of the journalist's story, not the speaker's story.
Here's my advice: If you do an interview with a journalist, don't expect the journalist to be there to tell your story. The journalist gets paid to tell her own stories which you might or might not be a part of. And journalists, don't be so arrogant to think you are not "one of those" who misquotes everyone. Because that is to say that your story is the right story. But it's not. We each have a story. And whether or not someone actually said what you said they said, they will probably still feel misquoted.
Good grief, what a self-serving load of crap. A lot of what she is saying is true, in a general sense. We do all have our points of view, so true objectivity is all but impossible. And there are many stories in an overall narrative. That's why the blogosphere has grown, drawing in people who just to get their stories out.
But someone still has to get as much of the story as possible and tell it as straightforwardly and without bias as possible. The journalist does not "get paid to tell her own story" but to describe the world as it is perceived. Those perceptions might be subjective, but there is no justification to making the descrpitions deceptive in service to some larger truth. We are all searching for that larger truth, and a grasp of objective reality should be our preferred starting point. As long as journalists presume to provide that objective reality, they should leave "the narrative" to the artistic community.
