The Puppetry of Quotation Approval

Now that it’s become clear that many journalists covering politics and government agree to quotation-approval as a condition of access, it’s tough not to see the pageant of democracy as just that: a carefully constructed performance meant to showcase the participants in the best light.

In July, my colleague Jeremy Peters pulled back the blanket on the growing practice of allowing political sources to read and approve quotations as a precondition for an interview. His story got attention inside and outside the Beltway, in part because the quotation is the last refuge of spontaneity in an age of endlessly managed messages. When quotations can be unilaterally taken back, the Kabuki is all but complete.

Those rules of engagement drew new scrutiny last week when Michael Lewis, the author of a forthcoming profile of President Obama in Vanity Fair, acknowledged that he had to get approval for the quotations he used from eight months of extensive access.

Good thing those of us who cover business don’t have to deal with the same self-preserving press policies. Except we do. In an anecdotal survey of 20 reporters, it was clear that on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and at some of the big media companies I cover, subjects of coverage are asking for, and sometimes receiving, the kind of consideration that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

It used to be that American businesses either told reporters to go away or told them what they wanted to know. Now, a reporter trying to interview a business source is confronted by a phalanx of factotums, preconditions and sometimes a requirement that quotations be approved. What pops out of that process isn’t exactly news and isn’t exactly a news release, but contains elements of both.

“Requests for quote approval rise in direct proportion to the involvement of P.R. people,” said Felix Salmon, a business columnist at Reuters. “As the flack-to-hack ratio continues to rise, the number of requests for quote-approval will continue to rise as well.”

I’ve had my own encounters. Within the past year, I’ve had a communications executive at a media company ask me to run quotations by him after an interview with the chief executive. I’ve had analysts, who are in the business of giving their opinion, ask me to e-mail the portion of the conversation that I intended to print. And not long ago, a spokesman, someone paid to talk, refused to put his name to a statement. Most of the time I push back, but if it’s something I feel I absolutely need, I start negotiating.

As someone who has covered Hollywood, I can’t begin to catalog the number of distasteful communications customs in that industry. And reporters I spoke to said Wall Street companies have been trying to negotiate quotations for a decade, in part because one poorly chosen word could cost millions or even billions. But now it is leaking into all corners of the kingdom.

(How silly can it get? After sending out e-mails to reporters who cover business, I got many revealing stories. But guess what? In most cases their employers — news outlets — don’t allow them to speak on the record.)

When you think about it, business leaders have more leverage than government executives because there is a presumption that public officials should be just that, public. But politicians and their aides seize on the hyper-competitiveness and bargain with hungry reporters. Ben Smith of BuzzFeed said Mr. Peters’s story made him more mindful of the process.

“We resist it whenever we can and disclose it when we can’t,” he said.

A few things are at work here, some of them legitimate. Journalism is a blunt technology. Reporters don’t generally record most interviews and can’t always type or write as quickly as a subject is speaking. I have been written about enough to know that what appears in quotation marks is sometimes an approximation of what is actually said. Sources want to protect themselves from routine distortion.

But something else more modern and insidious is under way. In an effort to get it first, reporters sometimes cut corners, sending questions by e-mail and taking responses the same way. What is lost is the back-and-forth, the follow-up question, the possibility that something unrehearsed will make it into the article. Keep in mind that when public figures get in trouble for something they said, it is usually not because they misspoke, but because they accidentally told the truth.

Even when the ground rules are transparently conveyed in an article, it raises questions. In July 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek did a profile of Elizabeth Warren, the fearless champion of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Well, sort of fearless. Deep in the article the writer noted in passing, “The press office is jittery about allowing reporters to talk to staff on the record, and Warren agreed to two interviews on the condition that Bloomberg Businessweek allow her to approve quotes before publication.” That caveat made me read the profile with different eyes because the locus of control seemed to be reversed.

Of course, quotations often serve as furniture in a house that a reporter is free to build as she or he (or their editor) wishes, so it’s not as if sources can control the narrative by controlling what appears between quotation marks. But a great quotation, the kind that P.R. folks love to rub out, in my experience, can make an article sing or the truth resonate.

“I hate that we find ourselves at this pass,” said David Von Drehle, a writer for Time who has covered politics for a long time. “But we are not blameless. Sound-bite journalism that is more interested in reporting isolated ‘gaffes’ than conveying the actual substance of a person’s ideas will naturally cause story subjects to behave defensively.”

Thankfully, some pushback is under way and young journalists are among those doing the pushing. This month, the editors of The Harvard Crimson said they would no longer allow school officials to approve their quotations. The longstanding policy was discontinued, they wrote in a letter to readers, because “sometimes the quotations are rejected outright or are rewritten to mean just the opposite of what the administrator said in the recorded interview.”

Journalism in its purest form is a transaction. But inch by inch, story by story, deal by deal, we are giving away our right to ask a simple question and expect a simple answer, one that can’t be taken back. It may seem obvious, but it is still worth stating: The first draft of history should not be rewritten by the people who make it.