On Sunday, as mentioned here, Boston Herald sportswriter Steve Buckley passed a hockey player’s statement on to that player’s coach and asked for comment. Steve acknowledged he might not have gotten the player’s statement exactly right. Fortunately, the coach remembered what he had said and they got to the bottom of it. No harm. No foul.

A similar attempt to use a second-hand quote to get a reaction surfaced over the past couple of days. It worked, in that it generated a national story. But it exposes a slimy underbelly of journalism. A sportswriter misrepresented what he heard from one coach and prodded basketball player LeBron James for a reaction. James, believing the quote was accurate is caught reacting, overreacting actually, to something that was NEVER SAID.
Thanks to Dan Devine of Yahoo! Sports for putting this he-said/he-said “reaction” story in perspective in a report yesterday.
Here’s the original statement from Indiana Pacers head coach Frank Vogel (shown below), when he was asked over the weekend about the daunting prospect of facing the Miami Heat:

“This is not about getting back at Miami. If you’re in the final four, you’re competing for a championship. You’re competing for a championship. And they’re just the next team that’s in our way.”

Fair enough. Pretty standard coachspeak.
Groping for a story, Chris Tomasson of Fox Sports Florida scurried over to the Heat’s LeBron James and presented Vogels’s statement this way, looking for a reaction. To make sure he got a reaction, he misrepresented Vogel. He said this:

“Vogel kept saying last night that you guys are just another team.”

LeBron James, succumbing to this nasty journalistic trick, took some umbrage and gave Tomasson a story. James said this:

“We’re not just another team. I don’t understand what he’s saying. But we’re not just another team. It’s not true…. We’re not just another team. We’re a great team. We’re very confident. We’ll be ready for them. But if we’re just another team, you really don’t prepare for just another team. We’re not just another team. You got to be prepared for us.”

Now, back to the source, Coach Vogel:
“Sorry sports world, the words ‘just another team’ never came out of my mouth. Great respect for LBJ and the champs. Looking forward to [a] great series.”
It’s a cumbersome approach, I guess, but the best way for an interviewee to deal with the “so-and-so said XXXXX; please respond” question is to ask to SEE EXACTLY WHAT WAS SAID IN PRINT or LISTEN TO A RECORDING and PRESS FOR CONTEXT. I think some journalists are undisciplined about quotations in print. Why would a third-hand retelling be reliable.
Is this the “Telephone Game” revisited?

A man ‘wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it,’ George Orwell wrote.

The Times, perhaps rightly, assumes that readers know such things, but I usually fall short. So I scurried for the source and the context of the thought-provoking Orwell quotation. I guess my main question was: To what kind of man does Orwell refer? Or is it generally applied?

The quote lies within Orwell’s 3,300-word essay “Shooting an Elephant,” which was first printed in the late 1930s. From the context, we see that Orwell refers to the “white man” (presumably British) who is trying to survive/live/lead/thrive/pretend as a “sahib” in Burma. He speaks with lots of authority here because he served in Burma as an imperial police officer in the 1920s. Here’s the passage that includes the quotation (with a little emphasis added):

I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

Is the statement rightly applied here? Well it depends. If it implies that Hemingway felt outside pressures to wear the mask and then live up to it–at the expense of being true to himself–then, probably. But any concern for the proper handling of the quotation dissolved in the face of the essay. I loved reading it, happy that the review sent me there. I kept reading it, long past the “mask” quote. A key moment in Orwell’s tale came soon enough:

The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

I don’t want to give much away but I will say it took a while for the elephant to die. Orwell’s character would have benefited from being able to whip out a smart phone before pulling out that “beautiful German thing.” He could have gone to this amazing site and seen this helpful diagram:

Quotes are not only reported. They are sometimes—often, really–used by journalists to elicit responses from newsmakers. Accuracy is important in either case.
The fragile nature of quoting and quote-retelling surfaced during a postgame press conference Sunday May 19, 2013, after the Boston Bruins defeated the New York Rangers. Fortunately in this case, the journalist, Steve Buckley of the Boston Herald, and Claude Julien, head coach of the Boston Bruins, got to the bottom of it and established what exactly the coach had told defensemen Torey Krug when he came up to the Bruins.
To set the stage, a bit, defenseman Krug (right) had just had a locker-room session with reporters and told them that Coach Julien had told him upon his arrival to not be afraid of making a mistake while on the ice. [I'm not sure EXACTLY what Krug said; I watched it on TV amid the postgame interviews but cannot find it on the Web this morning.]
Buckley had evidently heard the comment and wanted Julien to elaborate on that advice. It turns out that Buckley had misunderstood or misheard Krug. However, he had the good sense to let Julien know he might have misunderstood Krug’s statement. Here’s how the 22-second exchange went, beginning at about the 2:27 mark in this video from the NHL site.

Steve Buckley: Krug was saying, just a few minutes ago, he said that the one piece of advice you gave him was—I’m paraphrasing–something along the lines of, ‘Don’t be afraid to be scared, don’t be scared.’ When you tell a kid that arent you fearful he will be scared?

Claude Julien: No. I said, “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.” You know, I don’t want him playing on his heels, and in other words I told him, I said, “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, go out there and play your game.” So that was basically, Steve, what I told him when he first got here. ….. [He elaborates on the point}...

The message about fear and mistakes was the major thrust of Steve’s article in today’s Herald [shown above]. Fortunately Steve didn’t run with his original idea of what Krug had said or he might have jumped down a rabbit-hole of analyzing the fear of fear–surely drawing quotes FDRoosevelt or Freud.

In this context, the “don’t be afraid” message applies to journalists as well as rookie defenseman. Steve was not afraid to let Julien—and the assembled post-game scribes—to know he might not have gotten Krug’s original statement right. He went to the source. Kudos to him.
No time in the penalty box.

In her breathless, I-rarely-have-time-for-a-verb writing, gossipy Cindy Adams passes on quite a prediction that she attributes for former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (shown at the right).
She presented it (on Page 12 of the September 18 issue of the New York Post, shown above) this way:

“Reported to me, Henry Kissinger has stated–and I quote the statement word for word: ‘In 10 years, there will be no more Israel.’
“I repeat: ‘In 10 years, there will be no more Israel.’”

She offers no CONTEXT for the quote. Hey, given the chronological prediction, it would have been good to add WHEN he might have said that. The way she presents it (“has said”), she implies that Kissinger has said it a few times.
Her presentation (leading a column that also dealt with Katie Couric, Harvey Weinstein, Kourtney Kardashian etc.) drew some reaction.
That reaction surfaced over the last couple of days. Reporters from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) have gotten a response from Kissinger’s office.
According to posts in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel from earlier today, staff member Tara Butzbaugh (who works in Kissinger’s office at Kissinger Associates, said this:

“It’s not a misquote. He didn’t say it.”

It’s worth checking. I can’t find it.
But Adams has put the statement in play. It now has life on the Web. Some find it quite believable. Others–in the spirit of Robert DeNiro (portraying Conrad Brean) in Wag the Dog–deny, deny, deny.

“… I admired the proud English ships in those two superb harbours Then there awoke in me the wish to build ships of my own like these some day, and when I was grown up to possess as fine a navy as the English.”

Seeing that the Wolff’s Agency (a voice of the German government) was going to wire the speech to Berlin for inclusion in newspapers, an alarmed von Bulow intervened and–in his words–”corrected it.”
When the Kaiser read the words attributed to him in the Kieler Zeitung, he complained, “You’ve made me another new speech–and you’ve left out just the best bits.”
Von Bulow’s explanation to the Kaiser:

“Believe me, Your Majesty–this is far better for yourself and every one concerned. If you describe our fleet, constructed with such heavy cost, sometimes with danger, so sentimentally, as the outcome of your own personal inclinations and juvenile memories, it will not be easy to obtain further millions for naval construction from the Reichstag.”

The change had little to do with influencing public opinion. It was based on the manipulation of Germany’s Imperial Diet. That’s a major reason why people in power are anxious about how they appear in the news media.

Dick Polman of the Philadelphia Inquirer rightly screams about the quote-approval practice that has sullied some of the New York Times’–among others–coverage of government and politics. His column has appeared all over the Web the last couple of days and in print in numerous papers, including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which used the headline “Political Handlers as Editors” (above).
However, he falls into the trap of linking a well-oiled quote to George Orwell (right)–without mentioning that the authorship appears to be in question.
The quotation–which makes journalistic hearts quiver and flutter in appreciation–usually goes like this:

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.”

The trouble is that it’s not all that clear that Orwell wrote that, as far as I can tell–despite what you might be told by sites like quotevadis.com
One place I turned this morning to find out more is the Orwell quotations entry at wikiquote.org.
Here some people are seeking proper attribution and sourcing for the quotation. The search continues. One contributer compares it to something attributed to William Randolph Hearst:

“News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.”

I certainly have no problem with Mr. Polman using the quotation. It’s relevant to his topic and thought-provoking, too. However, instead of putting it in Orwell’s mouth and saying bluntly that he “once wrote” it, he should say the statement is, instead, often merely attributed to Orwell.
Even so, the error is not worth reporting to the Ministry of Truth.
I look forward to finding the source some day.

If I might misquote Robert Preston for a moment, it must be said that Trouble with the Curve starts with “T” and that rhymes with “C” and that stands for Clint–and also confusion.

It’s a snappy beginning. Clearly, the writer is hoping that the reader can draw from a musical that was released in movie form in 1962.
As usual, my lack of knowledge sent me scurrying to the Google search engine. It really wasn’t that hard because I assumed the writer was referring to Preston’s most famous role… as the slick Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. The song is “Ya Got Trouble.” According to this site, Harold’s line (repeated a few times) is in this sequence:

Townspeople: Oh, we got trouble
Harold: Right here in River City
Townspeople: Right here in River City
Harold: With a capital ‘T’ and that rhymes with ‘P’ and that stands for ‘pool’

Although the movie is getting kind of old, and references might bypass numerous readers, I like the tip-o’-the-straw-hat to the production. The movie, after all, celebrates its 50th movie-release anniversary.
Below, is the YouTube presentation of the song:

My dependable wrist watch is dying, slowly dying, to misquote Mark Anthony in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra.

A couple of things. First, he spelled the name Antony wrong in the character’s name and in the title of Shakespeare’s play.
Second, here’s what Shakespeare had Antony say:

“I am dying, Egypt, dying….”

It’s a fine quote. It’s a fine literary reference. But the intentional misquote still, to me, seems too obscure. This struck me as too much of a stretch. It’s a cute column, but why use the quote at all, replacing “Egypt” with “slowly”? Any connection between Antony and the columnist’s watch other than the fact that they are dying?
That said, I’d like people to know that, to misquote Antony and Cleopatra, I love some intentional misquotations more than figs.*
(*NOTE: The original from the tragedy is “I love long life better than figs.”)

“[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.

There’s a sometimes-effective tool that journalists use that I can only call “the intentional misquote.” There’s nothing nefarious about it. Rather, it’s a literary device of sorts that allows a journalist to make a clever turn on a familiar phrase. Or, on a lower level, it’s a quick and easy way to try to convince a reader that a journalist might actually be familiar with a passage from a book or a poem or a speech or a plaque or a Hallmark card. Preliminary indications lead me to believe that there’s something distinctly British about this, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
The humorous Petronella Wyatt used “the intentional misquote” in a very funny piece about handbags in today’s editions of London’s The Mail (“What’s in your bag, Ma’am, Apart from the chocolate, the plasters and the gin…”)
Here’s how she began it:

For men, a handbag is a thing apart, for women ’tis their whole existence, to misquote Byron and to echo the sentiments of Judge Zoe Smith, who told a handbag thief at Reading Crown Court last Week that stealing a woman’s bag ‘is not just inconvenience, it causes fear as well….

In that opening line, Wyatt mentioned Lord Byron, whom I have included here, in Albanian dress–a totally irrevelant homage to the recent Expendables 2 movie).
Wyatt doesn’t mention the source, which is Byron’s lengthy Don Juan. The passage to which she refers is from Stanza 194 of Canto I:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
‘Tis woman’s whole existence.

Wyatt, therefore, has replaced “man’s love” with “the handbag”–a suitable switch given the satiric nature of the original verse. I didn’t mind scurrying to Google to figure out more about the quotation, but a mention of the original poem might have been appropriate. I might be the only one in this position, but I don’t have Lord Byron, for example, at either my beck or my call. Then again, English readers have a lot more grounding in poetry than I. It might simply be my problem.
If so, thanks for the assist from Google and Bing and the rest of the search-engineers.