Just need a quote…
Thanks to my colleague Joe Hughes for pointing out that CBS News online quoted me the other day.
Unfortunately, the quote is a bit out of context (all quotes are necessarily a bit out of content, but that’s a discussion for another day). Here’s the line:
Missouri State University Professor Andrew Cline at Rhetorica agrees Cheney was just playing smart politics. “I can’t blame Cheney for making an excellent choice in how to play this situation,” he blogs.
My quote follows this:
But Paul at the conservative Wizbang blog offers a simpler explanation. “If he had allowed this to get out ‘fast break style’ the media would have screwed it up completely. Totally and completely,” he blogs. “Can anyone blame him for not wanting the story to come out screwed up?”
So it appears that my quote is positively commenting on Cheney’s withholding the information so that it would be reported more accurately. Not so. I was commenting on the tactic of using the concept of accuracy against the press; I did not accept Cheney’s excuse that he wanted to make sure the story was accurate. Nor do I think, as Wizbang does, that the press would have screwed it up (emphasis added):
I wondered how he would spin the time lag, and I was frankly awed by his choice: Hit the press where it lives by asserting one of its most important practices–a practice that crosses the boundary between craft and ethic.
What’s interesting about this tactic is that it attacks an epistemological weakness in our culture. “Accuracy” is not a fixed state, rather it changes over time as we learn new facts. When we arrive at something like a fixed state of “accuracy” we call it history. I’ll bet Cheney’s fixed state of “accuracy” sounded like common sense to a lot of people.
That said, I’m always happy to be quoted by a major news organization.
Gah. I appreciate the effort of news outlets to reach out online. But I’ve never understood the value of the increasingly popular blogger roundup form, especially for readers who’ve never read a blog. It’s like dumping a bowl of marbles on the table and trying to suss out the patterns.
It’s not a surprising form given easy it is to report. I’ve been quoted a few times over the last few years in regular news articles, as if I’ve given interviews, by reporters simply pulling quotes off of Rhetorica. I found out about one of them only after a radio station called wanting to do an interview based on a quote they read in the local paper taken from the blog
For me it’s not so much the quote yanking (but appropriating quotes for a story? Yikes!), it’s the lame attempt to turn the roundup into a roundtable.
I’ll withdraw my earlier analogy and replace it with a cocktail party. It’s like walking around the room jotting down random quotes and then trying to piece them together like the partygoers were involved in a panel discussion. Bleh.
re: roundtable… Yes, it’s a real problem of context.