I was subtly misquoted in the Medway News today. The spirit of the comment was more or less intact, but the actual words were twisted just enough to reduce their articulacy and distort their meaning, and a couple of key supporting points failed to appear.
A direct quote is a direct quote, and one would expect a trained journalist to either get it in shorthand first time or ask for it to be repeated. Unless there was particular reason for wanting to misquote someone.
Also, the paper wanted my address and the names of my wife and kids, just so you know. I can't imagine why those details were deemed relevant, but I didn't give that information. After all, I couldn't trust them to get it right, could I?
There was some rather selective quoting going on in the Medway Messenger article as well. I'm concerned, as the quote from me was taken from a chat with Alan Watkin and I had the impression that he's fairly trustworthy. There's always the chance that someone else wrote the article of course. Overall, thus week has painted a very bad picture of local journalism; I guess it's whatever keeps the advertising revenues and readers coming in that counts. I'd like to try and get an alternative newspaper off the ground at some point - the Manchester Mule looks like an excellent model for a free, independent local paper: http://manchestermule.com/about-mule
ReplyDeleteI spoke to Alan too, and remain convinced that he's a good guy. Of course, his copy may well have been edited prior to publication.
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