The Art of "Quotemanship" and "Misquotemanship"

Vice President Joe Biden has a penchant for quoting–or trying to–Irish poet W.B. Yeats (shown at right).
On Monday, September 17, he spoke on the phone with a few Iowa supporters while campaigning in that state.
Here’s what he said to Hal Goldstein, according to theblaze.com:

“[W]hat you ought to do is, this is, there’s awful lot in transition. There’s a great line from the Irish poet Yeats writing about his Ireland back in 1916, its called Easter Sunday 1916. And there’s a line in that poem that better describes, in my view, where we are today in the world than the state of his Ireland in 1916. It was after the first rising, the first attempt to rise up against the British in the 20th century and he said: ‘All’s changed, changed utterly. Terrible beauty has been born.’”

Theblaze was unfazed.
The reaction was different at the IrishCentral web site, which pounced earlier today.
For one thing, Biden got the title of the poem wrong. It’s Easter 1916.
For another thing, Biden’s version of Yeats’ line went this way:

“All’s changed, changed utterly.
Terrible beauty has been born.”

The actual last line is “A terrible beauty is born.”

Although the writing is hard to read, here’s a snip below of the two lines from the manuscript of the poem, from the Web site of the National Library of Ireland.

An occasional Yeats reference has been known to roll from the tongue of the vice president. And it’s not always wrong. He quoted from from Yeats’ A Woman Young and Old
while speaking at a convention of the National Association of Police Organizations in Manalapan, Florida, on July 23, 2012. His presentation came three days after the movie-theater killings in Aurora, Colorado. The somber tone matched this couplet from Yeats:
“Pray I will sing and sing I must
And yet I weep–”
These words, he quoted accurately.
He used the same phrase a month and a half later during a moving speech in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2012.
He didn’t quite nail it, but he was close. On that occasion, he switched a conjunction and according to this transcript said, “But yet I weep.”
He got eleven out of twelve words right. Not bad.
And yet, Yeats lovers weep.

The Republican National Convention has effectively dismantled an original statement to come up with its “We Built It” campaign. The effort has its foundation in a statement President Barack Obama made in Virginia on July 13. The single sentence that sparked it: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
That statement, on its own, is all the hammer-and-tong-wielding GOP want people to hear.
Pulllleeeeze.
It begs context.
That’s what Joe Berland of San Rafael, California, called for in a letter published in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday (Aug. 30).
In his letter he chastised columnist Debra J. Saunders–who used the one-sentence quote while writing about the convention–for using the sentence, as quoted and shorn of context, in her column on Aug. 29.
Berland says the preceding sentences need to be screwed, bolted, nailed and glued to the “you didn’t build that” statment. He gives it this way:

“Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system…that allowed you to thrive.
“Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that.“

Berland is saying, of course, the THAT (which the business builder didn’t build) actually refers to the “American system… roads and bridges.”
Berland’s voice-in-the-wilderness plea at the end of his letter bears repeating:

“Our country would be so much greater if we would argue the facts rather than distort the words of our opposition.”

If fairness to Saunders, the Chronicle columnist, I think the well-intentioned letter-writer took her statement a bit out of context, himself. Referring the Tampa convention’s “We Built It” theme, she wrote:

“This is the Republican response to President Obama’s assertion in July that successful people didn’t succeed without help from teachers, mentors and government: ‘If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that’.”

It certainly would have been easy for her to add that the statement has been taken out of context, but she did provide some of the president’s thinking preceding the quote.
For the record, an editorial in Thursday’s Anniston Star provided more of the context for the Obama statement, from that July 13 speech:

“Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. … If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

He then said, according to the White House transcript of the speech (which eliminates some repeated words and expands some contractions for some reason):

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

There’s plenty of opportunity to build, right?

This YouTube clip includes only the “you didn’t build that” statement.

IF you have about 42 minutes, here’s a YouTube presentation of the whole speech.

Vigilant media watchdogger Craig Silverman, in his column in the Toronto Star on Saturday 21 April, points out how the addition of a period put a horrible twist to the words of an officer in the Afghan military, Ghulam Jehlani Shafiq (left, as pictured in The Australian on 14 April).
[Silverman has quite a reputation for spotting errors by the media. He does not limit himself to examining quotations only. His book, and blog, share the title: Regret the Error. It's worth tracking.]
The correction, printed in The Australian on Monday 16 April sums it up well:

DUE to a production error, a quote attributed to Lieutenant Colonel Ghulam Jehlani Shafiq in a report in The Weekend Australian on Saturday (“Afhanistan batles scourge of corruption”, page 16) was altered to change its meaning. Colonel Jehlani did not say: “It’s not like 25 years ago. I was killing everybody.” In fact, he said: “It’s not like 25 years ago I was killing everybody. At that time too we tried not to have civilian casualties.” The Australian apologises for the error.

The statute of limitations, of course, doesn’t help here.
To, perhaps, better illustrate how utterly damaging that type of error is, it might help to see how it originally appeared in print. That’s a screen capture of it at below:

Ah, the good old days! When you could kill everybody! Ouch.

A column by soccer-writer Mninawa Ntloko of South Africa’s Business Day deals with the recent firing of Vladimir Vermezovic (right), coach of the South African Premier Soccer League’s Kaizer Chiefs. The article, published on 18 April, chronicles a stormy relationship the coach had with the media and others. Ntloko recalled the time when the coach stormed out of a press conference in Johannesburg in October of 2010. The volatile Vlad appeared to be on the verge of impaling the journalists because he was upset that he had been “misquoted” by the Daily Sun. The paper had printed an article in which the coach criticized the play of one of his star players–Kaizer Motaung Jr., whose father is executive chairman of the team.
It turns out that the reporter from the paper had a tape recording of the interview, which exonerated the reporter and the Daily Sun. Later, the coach acknowledged that he had not read the article properly and was misinformed. He apologized to the Daily Sun–”and only the Daily Sun“–two days after his outburst. The apology ruffled the feathers of the soccer scribes. They were miffed that he did not apologize to the entire group. The reporters then tried to give him the silent treatment.
A few days later, he apologized more generally. Here’s what he said during that apology/explanation, as presented as, I guess, only a Serbian can–according to a 21 October 2010 posting by www.kickoff.com:

“I said what I said [at the village in Naturena]. I was emotional and coming from Serbia, sometimes from that we think with the balls not the brain. My English is not so perfect and I was in trouble.
“I would like this opportunity to apologise to everybody. During my time here I have had a good relationship with the media and we can continue in that way.”

The balls/brain distinction is classic. But now the relationship is over.

Actress Kamna Jethmalani might have used an inappropriate term of endearment for Lord Venkateswara (a form of the Hindu god Vishnu).
Now she is playing both the “misquote” and “out of context” card in her attempts to distance herself from her statement, according to an article in the Deccan Chronicle of 13 April.
She was widely quoted as calling Venkateswara her “boyfriend” after she attended a darshan at Tirumala Hills. Her explanation:

“I was misquoted and my off-the-cuff remark was presented out of contxt. I said that God was like a friend, father and brother to me, but the media blew the friend quote out of proportion.”

The online version of
the article in the Deccan Chronicle of 13 April includes a comment from a fellow actress, Shraddha Das. She was there, evidently. She says, ‘lighten up’, or, more precisely:

“I was with Kamna during the darshan in Tirupati. She becomes a completely different person whenever she visits the temple. She was very elated there. The word ‘boyfriend’ was a slip of the tongue. She meant it as a friendly gesture.”

There’s a correction in the Philadelphia Inquirer of 4 April 2012:

A story in some editions Tuesday misquoted Rutgers professor David Redlawsk, who said: “Those working toward the merger have apparently not made their case to New Jerseyans over the past six weeks.”

I appreciate any public correction, kind of. Unlike the New York Times, the Inquirer (like many other news outlets) avoids telling readers exactly what was wrong with the original quote. Nor does it here give the subject of the article, or even the headline. This evasiveness seems strange, although it lines up with a general industry-wide desire not to repeat an error. I get that when libel might be a concern. But that’s rare. Clarity is good. Transparency, remember, is something journalists often demand of others. This approach seems a bit hypocritical.
Anyway, back to the Inquirer.
The story, “Democratic war of words over Rutgers-Rowan merger plan continues”, dealt with the possible realignment of two universities: Rowan and Rutgers-Camden. (Rowan is the University Formerly Known As Glassboro State College,) The story said a recent poll found that 59 percent of registered voters in the state of New Jersey were against the planned merger. That fact the stage for a quotation from Redlawsk, which ended the article. The quote and attribution were presented this way:

“Those working toward the merger have apparently not made their case to New Jerseyans,” Rutgers political science professor David Redlawsk said in a statement.

Attributing the words to “a statement” implies some sort of written source. Therefore, it’s easy to check the accuracy. Unfortunately, the quote ran out of gas and stopped at 14 words, five words short of the full sentence.
This is, essentially, what happened to the statement:

“Those working toward the merger have apparently not made their case to New Jerseyans over the past six weeks.”

The amputation removed what Mr. Redlawsk (right) surely thought was a key qualifier. The time-frame, given the ongoing nature of the merger discussion, would seem to be important. Dropping the last five words makes the statement much more far-reaching, and turns it into a sweeping criticism with no beginning or ending.

I call this a STEROID QUOTE, one that is strengthened by the removal of a qualifying phrase.