Flying Pig
Hold on to your hats, folks. For once - and only once - I am about to defend the Daily Monopoly Dog Trainer Los Angeles Times, just a little bit. Recently, Monopoly staff writer William Arkin wrote an exceptionally nasty piece on Lt. General Jerry Boykin, in which Arkin accused Boykin of “believing in a Christian ‘jihad.’”
Critics of Arkin, including Hugh Hewitt, Patterico and Lileks, have been quick to pounce on the fact that Arkin put quotation marks around the word jihad, despite the fact that Boykin had (obviously) never used that word himself. In my view, the quotation marks were probably the only thing in that article, aside from the spelling of Boykin’s name, that Arkin actually got right. Here’s the quote, in context:
All Americans, including those in uniform, are entitled to their views. But when Boykin publicly spews this intolerant message while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army, he strongly suggests that this is an official and sanctioned view
October 23rd, 2003 at 8:33 pm
I disagree with your conclusion that it was a “stroke of genius” for Arkin to use quotation marks around a characterization that many could have thought was a direct quote. I understand that you didn’t personally read it that way. And you are of course entitled to your opinion that people who read Arkin’s piece differently from you are “idiots, morons, and nincompoops.” However, many people unfamiliar with the controversy might have been misled by the quotation marks, even though you consider the opposite conclusion “glaringly obvious even to the dullest simpleton.”
October 23rd, 2003 at 9:22 pm
Methinks you’re confusing “apples” with “oranges.” Your misquotation of my views would be just as off base without the quotes as with them. The same goes for Arkin’s stroke of “genius” as well.
October 23rd, 2003 at 10:11 pm
Well, if you really think that Arkin’s piece was “a pile of dog crap” because his comments about Boykin were “the biggest pile of lies told by anyone since Josef Goebbels,” I assume that you are retracting your defense of the Dog Trainer as the “arguably the most fair, balanced, and accurate news publication in the free world.”
Funnin’ aside, I don’t really understand your “apples and oranges” point, since you seem to equate my use of quotation marks with Arkin’s. If my misquotations and Arkin’s are both equally off base — quotation marks or no — how are his quotation marks the “only thing he got right”? Are mine the only thing I got right?
(Keep in mind that your post is readily accessible, so my “air quotes” can be checked against your original — unlike Arkin’s piece where he still refuses to make the transcript available. And you did say “obviously” — which leads me to believe that my own quotations were not “off base” but rather merely “hyperbolic and figurative in nature.”)
As a well-respected conservative/libertarian California blogger, you arguably have established for yourself a position of “some influence” on “policymaking” in this state. I think it’s a “serious mistake” to allow a man who believes in the “infallibility” of the Dog Trainer to hold such a “job.”
Final comment: we’ve all seen roadside billboards that read something like this:
My suggestion: Arkin should be “fired” and put to work creating these sorts of roadside billboards with superfluous quotation “marks” that mean “nothing.”
October 23rd, 2003 at 10:31 pm
Here’s a different way to look at it. I’m sure you and I can agree that Arkin’s essay was a “piece of crap.” However, anyone reading that last sentence will not infer from the quotation marks that I am suggesting that Arkin himself used the phrase “piece of crap.” Rather, they will infer, correctly, that the quotes are there to indicate that I’m really just attacking the quality of his piece, and not literally claiming that it is made out of excrement.
Returning to Arkin’s use of the quotation marks, I would have found the following two sentences equally offensive:
No, I take that back. Actually, I find the unquoted version slightly more offensive. Neither version says anything about what Boykin did or didn’t say, but the quoted version merely suggests that Boykin has gone overboard with his Christianity, while the quoteless version suggests that he’s actually declared a real jihad.
October 23rd, 2003 at 11:27 pm
This is actually Patterico’s wife here. I just had to weigh in and say that I have always seen this issue exactly like xrlq.
October 23rd, 2003 at 11:34 pm
Wir mussen den Snarkenremarken stoppen. Let’s talk straight talk. Might a non-idiot, reading Arkin’s column and knowing no other context, have concluded that Boykin used the term “jihad”? (Notwithstanding the interpretation of xrlq and Patterico-wife.)
I think the answer is “yes.” Ergo, Arkin screwed up, big-time. Our local Dog Trainer should issue a correction, if not an abject apology.
October 24th, 2003 at 5:18 am
My favorite journalistic tactic is when they ask you, “Would you say that yadda yadda” and then write the story as a spokesperson for XYZ sais “yadda yadda” yesterday.
Whenever asked “would you say…” the answer MUST ALWAYS be NO! Then you can say what you would actually say and they cannot paraphrase it back into their own words…
October 24th, 2003 at 7:02 am
That happened to me. “Would you say X?” “I don’t know about that, I think of it more like Y.” In the next day’s paper, I’d said X, in quotes.
October 24th, 2003 at 8:25 am
Once I had a reporter call me to ask me if a City Hall staffer had called me to berate me over a memo I wrote. I said she did not berate me and left it at that. The next day’s paper had 100-point headlines on page 1 about the memo, confirming me as its source, which by denying the berating, I confirmed its existence.
October 24th, 2003 at 5:29 pm
I had that “confirming its existence” tactic used on me. I thought I had given a fairly bland response to a question about a document, and someone explained to me later that the point of the reporter’s question had been merely to confirm the existence of the document.
Standard trick of the trade. The only halfway safe answer is “no comment” — and note that I said “halfway.”
October 25th, 2003 at 10:22 am
Thanks, Jeff.
You know, I’ve been on both sides of this thing. Some of the same reporters who probably misquoted you, misquoted me. Or distorted what I said. Or read things into my response that I didn’t intend.
As for asking, “Don’t you mean …” Good journalism professors actually teach that that is unethical.
As for asking, “Did you get in trouble because of that memo … ” I’ve never heard any ethics guru say that wasn’t wrong. I can see how that would be troubling to a source though … to feel tricked. And maybe it should be added to ethics courses.
And I’m with you on the “quote” thing, this time, Jeff.
December 9th, 2003 at 10:59 pm
DOWDIFICATION SPREADS AT THE NYT
The ever-forgiving Xrlq (motto: “Quotation marks? Schmotation marks!”) probably has no problem with this distortion of a quote in the New York Times. The story was about the new head football coach of Mississippi State. Every other news outlet to…
January 30th, 2004 at 9:00 pm
SPLITTING INFINITIVES
Xrlq’s excellent post on an error-laden Ass. Press story got me thinking about split infinitives. I noticed that the AP story in question split an infinitive, and I thought that it was about the only thing in the story that…