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.”