Jarvis reported on a complaint from NY Daily News columnist Zev Chafets on Maureen Dowd’s use of ellipses to alter the meaning of a statement by the president on Al Qaeda:
Here’s what she wrote:
“‘Al Qaeda is on the run,’ President Bush said last week. ‘That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated … they’re not a problem anymore.'”
Here’s what Bush actually said:
“Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.”
The Times has now altered the on-line version of the offending Dowd column to restore the President’s actual quote, to wit:
“Al Qaeda is on the run,” the president said in Little Rock, Ark. “That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely, being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.”
This correction was done silently, so the reader has no clue as to what Dowd actually wrote in the first place. Somebody needs to give those folks an ethics course, and any number of bloggers could teach it.
But now that the Times is re-writing columns in response to emailed complaints, some major rework of the Krugman, Kristoff, and Rich oeuvre is surely in progress.
UPDATE: See comments by Robert Cox of The National Debate, who broke the story initially.
oh my God! they what ?! they made a correction ?
oh i bet it was done so stealthy-like…covert liberal ops, huh ? those bastards.
(sarcasm ends here)
what’s the point here ?
if the original paraphrased quote was somehow wildy different than the corrected one, then i could see bringing ethics into question. but it’s not.
but it was a _correction_ of a paraphrase for crying out loud! i know it might sound crazy, but sometimes that happens in the newspaper business.
shocking, i know.
The point is they didn’t acknowledge making a correction, and without the acknowledgement the column makes no sense.
I’m sorry if the point is too subtle for you to grasp.
again, it’s not technically a correction. Both versions have the same meaning, and they have every ethical right to paraphrase (i.e. using ellipses) as long as the intent, context, and meaning is the same.
All they did was expand the paraphrasing, for whatever reason, which is in their right. There is no “correction” made here…they have no reason to post such a notice of a correction. No meaning or context was ‘twisted’ whatsoever, and I’d love to see how someone would think so.
Is the NYT unethical? some of their writers sure seem to be. But in this case it’s not, and I can’t imagine any investigation into Dowd’s piece would say so. There are plenty of cases where the Times has been unethical. This isn’t one of them.
No, tf, both versions don’t have the same meaning. The original version sounds like triumphalism, a proclamation that we no longer have anything to fear from Al Qaeda, whereas the second (and actual) version makes it plain that we simply have nothing to fear from those Al Qaeda’s who happen to be dead or in prison.
Dowd’s context must be obscuring the meaning of the misquote for you, or perhaps you’re simply quite stupid.
Nope. Not stupid at all. I just know that when I read something on the Editorial page I know that I’m going to get someone’s biased opinion. But I see now your point. The misquote must have been ‘obscured’.
While I see your perspective, I don’t think that the quote or change of the quote effects the article in any significant way at all. Her points are still made. Dowd doesn’t need to change a quote to create triumphalism. She can do that quite well without misquoting anyone. She could leave the quote untouched, and still make the point that this quote came before the recent bombings. One can make the connection then that since half of the top guys are not a problem, then it must have been the other ‘half’ of them that planned the Saudi bombings, huh ?
I think this has more to do with you not liking Dowd’s opinions that it does with her changing a quote.
Again…if you think that “you know when you pick up a paper … where its bias lies, and you interpret accordingly.” and that ” This isn’t too much for the poorly-educated American public to do for themselves.” then you shouldn’t have a problem with this. It’s the _EDITORIAL_ page. That’s where bias happens, by definition.
p.s. the burden of posting corrections to articles falls on the newspaper’s editors, not its writers, and reflects on the owners of the organization. Let’s say you are right, and they are being unethical. Imagine if the owners of the NYT also owned every major TV and radio stations, and every major regional newspaper, too. Man, that sort of unethical behavior might have the ability to run throughout all of those channels, huh ? And since there would be such a saturation, keeping that bias and behaviour quite could be even easier. Cool, huh ?
Sorry, ‘tf’, the burden of not lying falls on the writer, and the burden of not printing the writer’s lies falls on the editor. If a lie slips through into print, the burden of correcting it openly and honestly falls on both. Both have failed now, twice each.
How is Dowd’s first quotation a lie? It omits crucial words so as to make Bush appear to say that al Qaeda as a whole is no longer a problem, which is (a) utterly different from what he actually said, and (b) stupid, as their subsequent attacks showed.
Here’s an example of how ellipses (those triple dots) can be used to lie. If Roger Ebert were to say “The Matrix Reloaded is far from the greatest movie ever made” and someone else were to say “Roger Ebert says ‘The Matrix Reloaded is . . . the greatest movie ever made’!”, that someone would be a liar, pure and simple. Lying by omission is still lying.
That’s what Dowd did. Bush’s actual statement was not particularly triumphalistic. All he said was that we’re making steady progress in taking care of al Qaeda. Less than two years in, we’ve nailed roughly half of them. That’s good as far as it goes, but leaves a lot of work still to be done. Bush did not say or imply that the job was done or anywhere near done, or that finishing it would be quick or easy, and he did not suggest that further attacks are impossible or even unlikely. With half of them still at large, though on the run, it’s obvious that attacks are likely to continue, though we hope to keep making the successful ones fewer and further between. (More competent and enthusiastic law enforcement in places like Bali and Riyadh and Casablanca would help a lot.)
Dr Weevil – I’m see the point. I think that I disagree about what Bush meant when he said “In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.” I’m not totally clear that he was referring to just the dead or imprisoned Al Qaeda. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see how he could have meant “they’re not a problem” to mean all or most of Al Qaeda. I know it sounds dumb, but alot dumber things have been said by presidents before, including Bush.
Note that I’m not arguing that Dowd is not biased. Nor am I arguing now that she didn’t purposefully misrepresent the quote. I have no idea. Is it easy to believe that she did, given her bias ? Of course.
Is is it equally believeable that Bush meant Al Qaeda as a whole was not so much of a “problem anymore” ? Yes, and I’ll tell you why.
Considering that two days before the quote in question (May 3rd), he said:
“We ended the rule of one of history’s worst tyrants, and in so doing, we not only freed the American people, we made our own people more secure.”
The president makes flubs like this quite a bit, and while I’m not anti-Bush as a matter of principle in the ways that most people quote “Bushisms”, I can see how someone could understand Dowd’s original and re-written quote to retain its meaning. This is also supported by the fact that the administration had/has been attempting to demonstrate how the war in Iraq (and Afganistan) has made the American people safer. (I, for one, do not feel any safer since the war in Iraq)
So again, I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to believe that Bush meant Al Qaeda in general when he said “they”.
As an aside, and not as a re-direct of the argument, in any case of the meaning of Dowd’s quote, this is an exellent example of how the US public, right and left, can benefit from a diverse array of perspectives across media channels, which should be guaranteed by law and not by the good faith promises of media market owners.
I am the guy who broke the Maureen Dowd story. There is more to it than you know.
link
The original story in Times Watch was based on my original email to the Op-Ed department and the Corrections department sent the morning of May 14th when the column ran in the Times (10:50 AM)
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AndrewSullivan picked up the story later that day from a reader who apparently forwarded him the Times Watch story (to be confirmed) which means that tens of thousands of people, including some people at the New York Times were aware of the problem long before the Times went ahead and syndicated the column nationally to hundreds of newspapers.
For those of you who are interested I will put up a second post with a more detailed history but to clarify one point. Her column on May 28th is a sort of non-correction, correction. A Times spokesperson confirmed that placing the full quote “It was Ms. Dowd’s decision” to run Bush’s comment in full, a Times spokeswoman said. “Her intention was not to distort the meaning of the quote. She had received a couple of complaints and was happy to put in the entire quote to satisfy readers who felt it was too truncated.”
Robert A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
TheNationalDebate.com
BTW, we have an interesting article on Maureen Dowd over at link
While continuing to press the New York Times for an explanation, I have continued to work this story on the internet. This effort began to pay off last week with a series of stories in print (Washington Times, Rocky Mountain News, The New York Daily News), television (CNN, FNC amd MSNBC) and radio (Imus, Limbaugh). Tony Snow of the Fox News Channel recently observed that the ?Maureen Dowd story? was a testament to the power of the ?blogosphere?.
The Rocky Mountain News then reported that their editors refused to run the column with the altered quotes link
The New York Daily News reported Wednesday that Maureen Dowd’s column was being investigated
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Maureen Dowd “responded” in her May 28 column by inserting the full version of the quote (without explanation)
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The Times told CNN and the New York Daily News that this “correction” closed the matter (scroll to the bottom)
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Thursday on CNN, Peter Vines did an extensive report on Lou Dobbs Moneyline. After reporting that the Times considers the matter closed because the full quote appeared in the May 28 column asked the right question: “how is that corrective?”
The Times “correction” was not good enough a newspaper in Texas which has suspended running Dowd’s column and demanded that she fully explain herself
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A Times spokesperson claims Dowd did not intend to distort the President’s words and was “happy” to set the record straight by running the full quote. A non-correction, correction.
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I finally got a call back from the media relations department at the Times which asked me to send an email to Gail Collins, Editor of the Times editorial page. I am told to expect a reply to my original email next week.
Robert A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
TheNationalDebate.com
[email protected]
Wouldn’t it be interesting if our friends at the National Debate put as much effort into parsing the words of the people who actually run this country–the Administration and its enablers in Congress–as it did newspaper columnists, who actually have no power at all?
Might be interesting to see.