By Steve Rhodes
1. Deborah Solomon vs. Studs Terkel.
From an interview of Studs Terkel by the Reader’s Michael Lenehan.
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TERKEL: For example, you said that you cut your questions out and you make it sort of a soliloquy. Well that’s what I do, you see. I keep the question in when it’s necessary, as a transition moment, or when a humorous or whimsical aspect can be revealed in an exchange. But generally speaking, I shift things around. An interview is not written in stone. You can adjust the sequences. But never altering the words – the words are the words of the person, that’s clear.
LENEHAN: But you’re the guy who set the form, Studs. I think it will be useful; writers are going to be interested to know what your rules are. So, for example, I would take a paragraph from the end and put it at the beginning, if that made the story go better.
TERKEL: Right. That’s right.
LENEHAN: I would take a sentence from the end of the paragraph and put it in the beginning if that made it clearer.
TERKEL: Right.
LENEHAN: I would change the order of words in a sentence, if that made it easier to read or understand.
TERKEL: That’s right.
LENEHAN: Because I take certain liberties with an interview, in order to make the story flow and everything clear, I usually find that I want to show the edited version to my speaker – to get him or her to sign off on it, and to be sure that I didn’t make any mistakes.
TERKEL: Or distort anything.
LENEHAN: Do you do that?
TERKEL: Some, yes. I don’t do it ordinarily, no. They just let it go. But now and then someone wants to see it, I send it.
LENEHAN: Do you think readers understand the extent to which we have to massage an interview to get it to come out the way it does?
TERKEL: I think the reader doesn’t think in those terms – doesn’t go so far as to think in terms of what you did.
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“”Cut and paste” is the term most writers would give to the sort of liberal editing described above,” Lenehan writes. “It’s a dirty term to some, but I would speculate that the technique is used by almost every writer who deals with extended quotations. (By extended I mean more than a paragraph of 100 words or so.) The deal, though it usually goes unspoken, is this: all these words came out of the subject’s mouth – but not necessarily in this order and a lot has been left on the cutting-room floor.
“Sometimes, I confess, it goes even farther than that. Sometimes I add a word, or in rare cases even a short, direct sentence, when no amount of rearranging can make the meaning and the voice come out right. I have my scruples: if a small number of judicious additions, rendered as simply and straightforwardly as possible, will not make the copy flow while saying to readers what the subject was trying to say to me, I’ll abandon the project or change the form of the piece (or passage) so it’s presented in my own voice rather than the subject’s. And I don’t do this without the subject’s permission. She’ll read the whole text and I will point out the additions. ‘You didn’t really say this in so many words,’ I’ll say, ‘but I think it’s what you meant. Is it OK with you?'”
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From a public editor’s column about New York Times Sunday Magazine “Questions For” writer Deborah Solomon.
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“Her sharp, challenging questions elicit pithy, surprising answers – a disloyal comment about an employer, a confession to a Diet Coke habit, what’s in Jack Black’s iPod.
“That is the illusion of Solomon’s column. The reality is something else: the 700 or so words each week are boiled down from interviews that sometimes last more than an hour and run 10,000 words. Though presented in a way that suggests a verbatim transcript, the order of the interview is sometimes altered, and the wording of questions is changed – for clarity or context, editors say. At least three interviews have been conducted by e-mail because the subjects couldn’t speak English or had other speech difficulties. And, Solomon told me, ‘Very early on, I might have inserted a question retroactively, so the interview would flow better,’ a practice she said she no longer uses.
“‘Questions For’ came under fire recently when a reporter for New York Press, a free alternative weekly, interviewed two high-profile journalists – Amy Dickinson, the advice columnist who followed Ann Landers at The Chicago Tribune, and Ira Glass, creator of the public radio program This American Life – who said their published interviews with Solomon contained questions she never asked.
“While the vast majority of Solomon’s interview subjects have never complained, these are not the first who have. Last year, The Times Magazine published an angry letter from NBC’s Tim Russert, who said that the portrayal of his interview with her was ‘misleading, callous and hurtful.’
“Afterward, Marzorati said, a new policy was put in place, requiring that Solomon give the tapes of her interviews to her editor or a magazine researcher, in case a subject raised an objection. It was then, Solomon said, that she also stopped inserting retroactive questions.
“Dickinson’s interview came in July 2003, before the new policy, and was not recorded. It starts with Dickinson saying that her column would be ‘funnier and snappier and might be more fun to read’ than Ann Landers. Solomon then says, ‘How immodest of you! Isn’t it bad manners to brag? Some of us found Ann Landers hilarious.’
“Dickinson said Solomon never said those words to her. If she had, Dickinson said, she would have bristled, instead of replying, as the interview had it, ‘I always found the entertainment value came more from the questions than the answers.’
“‘I was correctly quoted,” Dickinson said, ‘but what totally jumped out, the questions were not the same.’
“Solomon said she felt that Dickinson was being ‘boastful,’ and, ‘I’m sure I said as much.’
“The Glass interview was published last March, after the new safeguards were in place. Glass, who was just starting a television version of This American Life on Showtime, was stung by this printed exchange with Solomon: ‘Q: What do you think of the network? A: I don’t meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.’
“He did not deny saying it, but he said he was sure it came during a long conversation about how the network marketed itself. ‘I don’t believe she asked me that question,’ he said. ‘If she did, it certainly didn’t precede that answer.'”
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Comments?
1. From Kevin O’Reilly:
I think a distinction can be drawn here. Studs rearranged folks’ words to help them tell their stories better, while Solomon rearranges their words and inserts new questions in a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am style designed to embarrass and distort.
What do you think?
REPLY: I agree that the distinction you see here is important. But Studs also said that he shifted the sequence of what people said and, even more disturbing, approved of (and seemed to imply that he also used) Lenehan’s technique of moving paragraphs and sentences and words to help tell a story “better.” My suspicion is that this is not so much motivated by telling a story more authentically, but by the desire to create novelistic “narrative” out of non-fiction because, you know, it’s just better than real life. In this way, writers end up boxing their subjects into familiar archetypes, for example, or seeing their subjects only through the novelistic lens instead of the rougher, more contradictory way that real life operates. (This explains, in part, the mythologizing of someone like Barack Obama, for example, and the central insight of David Axelrod’s strategy in creating a biographical narrative with ready-to-go hooks to pitch to the press, erasing and rubbing out the parts that didn’t fit.)
I’m also strongly against showing a piece of journalism to a subject before publication; this is a fundamental tenet I don’t like to see violated. I was also always taught – and still believe – that you don’t submit your questions to your subject in advance, and yet that’s just what writers do in various instances, including in the political arena, both wittingly and when they use e-mail queries.
In Solomon’s case, it’s just sort of unbelievable to me – I know it shouldn’t be at this point – that she was doing what she was doing without any idea that it was unethical. Even with the new guidelines for her in place, I now read her pieces with doubt.
Finally, the thing is this: It’s just not necessary; if you can’t accurately convey what someone is telling you without using altering techniques, then maybe you should consider another line of work. And the point of it all isn’t storytelling anyway. It’s journalism.
KEVIN’S REPLY: I agree with your comments, and also with Hoyt’s summary of the NYT guidelines for Q-and-As, which approximate what I do. I certainly hold Studs to a different standard as he was doing oral history, not journalism as such. I do think folks should explain what their editing standards are if they’re doing anything radically different from a more or less verbatim transcript of the discussion.
REPLY: Yes, I should have mentioned that if you tell readers what you are doing, that makes a big difference. For example, when we do our Mystery Debate Theaters, we tell readers that they will be reading a transcript edited for length, clarity and comedy. And I agree that operating in different venues, such as oral histories, makes a difference too – as long as it’s clear to readers. Maybe the real problem with Solomon, then, was that all these years we thought we were reading a real exchange, the way it actually happened. Readers might not have that same kind of expectation when reading Studs; readers may presume he’s boiled down hours of tape and so on, and made certain kinds of alterations.
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2. From the University of Chicago Press:
“VICTIM OR URBAN GUERILLA?
“It was a story so bizarre it defied belief: in April 1974, twenty year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army – who had kidnapped her just nine weeks earlier.
“Patty’s Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America by William Graebner is the first substantial reconsideration of the story in more than twenty-five years. Read an excerpt and listen to an interview.”
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“THE ART OF NESTS
“Green architecture? Birds and insects are the original architects, contractors, and builders. See paintings from Architecture by Birds and Insects: A Natural Art by Peggy Macnamara.”
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3.” In Ann Arbor, left-wing politics managed to thrive alongside growing football fervor,” Jonathan Chait writes in his New York Times review of War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, and America in a Time of Unrest. “At halftime of the 1970 Rose Bowl, the Michigan marching band formed a peace sign. In 1971, two-thirds of the football team signed an antiwar petition. The theme for the homecoming parade that year was ‘Bring All the Troops Home Now’; at halftime, the P.A. announcer called for a full withdrawal of American troops and an end to aid for Vietnam.”
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4. The New York Times’ most notable 100 books of the year.
Posted on December 2, 2008