The media try hard to maintain accuracy. It is the first leg of the tripodal stool of news journalism’s ABCs – accuracy, brevity, clarity. But as an earlier post here testified (AA: Accuracy and audience, June 10, 2009) , complete accuracy continues to elude even the best practitioners. And admit it, the nature of media news gathering makes certain that will always be true.
That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s pursuit should, or will be abandoned, of course. Or that blips and blurs need not be scoped and prodded.
Here is a recent example of a more subtle level of inaccuracy that over time kicks the legs out of credibility.
Adam Liptak had a page 1 story in the New York Times on Sunday (7/12/09) headlined, “Path to Court: Speak Capably But Say Little.” The lead grafs were as follows:
WASHINGTON — On his first day at the Justice Department in 1981, a 26-year-old lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was handed a high-profile assignment: to help prepare Sandra Day O’Connor, then an Arizona judge, for her Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
“The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court,” Mr. Roberts wrote later that year in a report to a Justice Department supervisor, “but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments.”
That advice — sound as if you know what you are talking about but avoid saying anything — has been followed pretty faithfully by every nominee since, including the report’s author, who is now chief justice of the United States. And it may well be followed by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings are scheduled to begin Monday.
For my purposes I’m not going to smmarize the rest of the article. I will say that I have read many of Mr. Liptak’s pieces in the NYT and have no reason to think what happened here happens often or on purpose. I should also admit up front that the inconsistency I am pointing out could likely be an editing error done to make the lead-in copy more closely parallel the headline.
That said, we are looking at the first three graphs heading into the page jump, the fork where the majority of readers abandon the story. So to those readers any clarification further down in the story will be lost anyway.
So, does the copy in green accurately summarize the copy in red? No, it does not. What if you mitigate the red copy with the copy in blue? Still no, and readers not exercising an unbounded confirmation bias will flinch. I think this is a case where even those who want to believe the implication of the green copy will stumble here, and then rush on to more inviting, and smoother, copy.
Let me bring that green copy down here
sound as if you know what you are talking about but avoid saying anything
and match it to the headline
Path to Court: Speak Capably But Say Little
We have a closer match here. The two phrases are at least parallel in form if not exact meaning. But
speak capably = +/- sound as if yo know what you are talking about
but
say little ≠ avoid saying anything
Now that’s a nice little math exercise but would linguists agree? After all, say little would be accurate if there was an implied word following avoid saying anything as in avoid saying anything important, or large or meaningful or specific that would get you in trouble, which is what we assume is implied.
The spin damage here is to show the then Justice Department lawyer, now Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts, was counseling then Supreme Court nominee O’Connor to be vague and evasive in all her answers to legislators’ questions during her confirmation hearing.
But that isn’t what Mr. Roberts, by his own words was doing at all, was he?
“The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court,” Mr. Roberts wrote later that year in a report to a Justice Department supervisor, “but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments.
Connecting the matching parts the meaning is
The approach was [to demonstrate] a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments [without] giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court.
As I opined earlier, readers get it. And a contrary writing of the meaning just means another perception of inaccurate reporting.
