Quotation Ethics in Journalism
The professional rules governing how reporters may clean up, trim or condense what a source said.
News organisations maintain explicit policies on altering quotations, and they differ. The Associated Press position is that quotations may not be altered at all, beyond removing verbal stumbles such as 'uh'. Others permit light grammatical cleanup of spoken syntax, on the grounds that transcribing speech verbatim can make ordinary speakers look incompetent.
All mainstream policies agree on three prohibitions: no combining separate statements into one set of quotation marks, no changing words to sharpen meaning, and no removing material with ellipsis in a way that reverses sense.
The landmark legal case is Masson v. New Yorker Magazine (1991), in which the US Supreme Court held that deliberately altering a quotation can constitute defamation if the change materially alters the meaning of what was said.
Practical guidance for any writer: if a spoken sentence needs surgery to be readable, paraphrase it and quote only the phrase that survives intact. Paraphrase is honest; a tidied quotation presented as verbatim is not.
“Weak: "We are, I mean, we're looking at everything, all options." Better: The mayor said the city was "looking at everything", declining to rule out closures.”
Keep reading the glossary
Word-for-word — quoting exactly as the original was spoken or written.
The practice of letting a source review and revise their quotations before publication.
The graded conventions governing how an unnamed source may be quoted.
Three dots that mark words omitted from a quotation.