A story in the Daily Nation last week about the mother of Harambee Stars’ striker Dennis Oliech raises questions about how much readers can trust the Press to tell exactly what a subject said. It has to do with the way the media treats quotes.

The January 30 story, "Why my soccer star son snubbed millions," about a Sh200 million offer for Oliech to give up his Kenyan citizenship for a Qatari passport, dominated chatter the whole week. Yet, while there may never be factual evidence to corroborate this assertion, the words attributed to fishmonger Mary Auma Oliech sounded a little too perfect. Grammar was excellent, diction correct, syntax proper, and tenses accurate. With due respect to Auma, a critical reader is bound to wonder if the quotes were her actual words.

Sample this: "I told them [Qatari officials] that as far as I am concerned, Dennis was going to play for Kenya in Tunisia and that we could not even talk about him becoming a citizen of another country."

The Language

The modest-featured widow who has been covered on television speaking Kiswahili with an accent you could hang your coat on is reported to have added: "Money is not everything; Dennis does not just belong to me, he is representing Kenya and you can imagine how angry people would have been if he had accepted that offer."

The quotes spill into a third paragraph, uninterrupted. "What good is such money if it comes with the course of disappointed Kenyans, who would have felt betrayed by such a move?"

A problem smells here. The writer does not tell what language Auma was speaking in. It is assumed she answered the reporter’s questions in English, as it was quoted. And a reader in the UK would probably not notice anything odd, unless he or she knew that the average Kenyan on the street – let alone a mother of nine who sells fried fish in Dagoretti – seldom speaks conversational English. But a knowledgeable reader would squirm with discomfort, hunching a white lie.

Reconstruction

A telling sign is that people do not ordinarily speak in compound sentences or chunks of paragraphs. In ordinary speech, people speak short phrases. Such as, "We can’t make things meet" or "Everything’s going up." When quotes appear as compound sentences, the kind attributed to Oliech’s mother, they are all the more circumspect. And one begins to wonder if a creative reporter did not step in and reconstruct an awkward sentence into an intelligible quote. Others who find themselves throttled by deadlines, fierce competition, and the burnt-out syndrome may take the creativity a notch higher and invent quotes. Journalism unforgivingly frowns upon this.

Like one reporter found out last year.

Jayson Blair, a senior New York Times reporter, impressed many readers with his writing flair. He was envied by colleagues as an aggressive researcher and an achiever. So good was Blair that a noted New York-based journalism professor invited him as a model to speak to the professor’s class of student reporters, among them this writer, in the summer of 2002.

Jayson Blair case

Yet Blair resigned under pressure last May after his paper launched investigations into his work, on suspicions that he was seriously breaching journalism standards.

It turned out that Blair wrote compelling stories that purported he had interviewed informants in as far-away places as Texas, two-days drive from his base in New York, when all the time he didn’t leave base. Background material was lifted from other papers, and quotes made up. Would reporters here choose to walk the path of Jayson Blair? That’s a shuddering thought. But whenever quotes start to sound tweaked, things have a way of tumbling downward.

To an amazing degree, news is what people say – and how they say it. Quotes, as every novice reporter knows, are indispensable in news reporting. They put readers in touch with the people. In his book, The Craft of Interviewing, Tom Brady extols quotes as "those brief, brilliant bursts of life." That is what quotes do to a story: they throw bursts of life into an otherwise barren story. And they lend authenticity.

All you can do with direct quotes is to take it or leave it. Quotes are not subject to revision. Once words are enclosed within quotation marks, they must be what the source said. Attempts to "improve" that by reshuffling or even changing words are high crimes in this trade. There are places where people get fired for tweaking quotes just once. In Kenya, most media houses will correct minor grammatical errors and omit meaningless repetition. But seldom will a conscientious editor let you correct syntax, the orderly phrasing of a sentence. "Drop the quote," they’d tell you in a journalism class. The basic rule is: no quote is worth a lie. Paraphrasing an awkward punch-line would save the day. Rewriting it in your own words and plugging it within quotation marks would kill your integrity – and gradually your paper.

In the end it boils down to the question, whose word is it, the informant’s or the reporter’s? Drawing this distinction is, perhaps, the only effective way to get rid of the frequent charge against the media: "I was misquoted."

Seen questionable content in the press lately? E-mail kodi@kodibarth.com

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