I think The Washington Post has the right idea with their policy: “When we put a source’s words inside quotation marks, those exact words should have been uttered in precisely that form.”

If you were being interviewed by a journalist, wouldn’t you want them to use your exact words in the correct context rather than add in their own interpretation?

My ethics professor touched on this issue in class last week. He cited an example from July 2007 when a column and a separate news story quoted Clinton Portis two different ways in the same edition of – WHAT?! – The Washington Post.

“I don’t know how nobody feel, I don’t know what nobody think, I don’t know what nobody doing, the only thing I know is what’s going on in Clinton Portis’s life,” stated the column by Mike Wise.

“I don’t know how anybody feels. I don’t know how anybody’s thinking. I don’t know what anyone else is going through. The only thing I know is what’s going on in Clinton Portis’s life,” stated the news story by Howard Bryant.

Bryant’s defense: “For me, having covered athletes for 15 years, I’ve always felt conscious and uncomfortable about the differences in class, background and race – I’m an African American – and in terms of the people who are doing the speaking and the people who are doing the writing. I really don’t like to make people look stupid, especially when I understand what they’re saying.”

In my opinion, journalists are not PR agents; their job is to observe and report objectively. If we start making these subjective judgments about how to portray our sources, where do you draw the line? How do you as innocent readers know the truth?

If you think about it, the usage of recording devices by journalists is as much protection for us as it is for those who are interviewed.