« previous post | next post »

Daniel Libit, "Transcribers' agony: Frustrated not by what Trump says but how he says it", CNBC 8/15/2016:

Few conventions in political campaign coverage are as straightforward and unassailable as quoting a public figure verbatim. After all, how can there be any doubt when you are putting down the exact words someone says?

And yet, as with many other parameters of the process, Donald Trump has complicated this, too.

Libit has many complaints about Trump's speaking style, but in my opinion, the article's theme is inaccurate and unfair:

His unscripted speaking style, with its spasmodic, self-interrupting sentence structure, has increasingly come to overwhelm the human brains and tape recorders attempting to quote him.

Trump is, simply put, a transcriptionist's worst nightmare: severely unintelligible, and yet, incredibly important to understand.

In fact, his spontaneous speech is easy to transcribe, because it generally consists of short phrases separated by short silent pauses. And it's not in the least unintelligible in spoken form. Like most real-world spontaneous speech, it can be hard to understand if it's all run together in standard textual paragraphs — see"More (dis)fluency and (in)coherence" (12/31/2008) for some non-Trump examples, or "Trump's eloquence" (8/5/2015) and "Gertrude Trump" (6/19/2016) for some prior discussion of Trump's style — but in fact it works pretty well if printed as free verse.

Thus a passage from Trump's 8/13/2016 rally in Fairfield CT:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

I'll tell you in particular lately

we have a newspaper

that's failing badly

it's losing a lot of money

it's gonna be out of business very soon

the New York Times OK?

I love it!

And

they wrote a story today

"anonymous sources have said"

three anonymous sources, anonymous this, anonymous that

they don't use names, I don't really think they have any names OK?

but "anonymous sources have said"

there are no anonymous s- you know with my campaign, I'll be honest with you

it's me

it's me

they never call me

they don't call me

but these are the most dishonest people

The good news is- I love- you know I put down

"failing @ New York Times"

the newspaper's going to hell

they got a couple of reporters in that newspaper who are so bad

with- I mean lack of talent

but it's going to hell

so I think maybe what we'll do

maybe we'll start thinking about taking their press credentials away from them

maybe we'll do that

I think so

I think so

you know

when they write dishonest stories

you can't read em it's so much

you can't read em there's so much I'd be reading all day long.

When they write dishonest stories

we should be a little bit tough, don't we agree, you know?

Real garbage they're garbage it's a garbage paper OK

So here's the story folks, talking about garbage

talking about garbage

talking about garbage

you have a governor in this state who's done a very poor job.

I think that's what Libit's sources mean by calling Trump "the em-dash candidate":

To untangle the jumble, his stenographers are increasingly reliant on a punctuation known as the "em dash" (—), which are used to separate parentheticals within the same sentence. Philip Rucker, The Washington Post's national political correspondent, said that among reporters covering Trump, he has become known as the "em-dash candidate."

But they're just missing out on the opportunity to transcribe Trump as poetry.

Libit's piece closes with a bunch of stuff about how

… there's an ongoing press debate as to whether quoting Trump verbatim conveys him most accurately. This debate divides, in part, between those who think Trump is merely inarticulate, and those who think he's being savvily obtuse.

I really don't understand this argument, because it's false that Trump is in any way inarticulate. He makes skilled use of the resources of the spoken language, and if the results don't translate very well to standard written paragraphs, that's just evidence of the inadequacy of orthography. He often communicates by implication rather than by explicit statement, and sometimes says things are that false or misleading — but those are properties that he shares with many other politicians and hucksters who have learned to speak in prose suitable for paragraphed presentation.

Overall, I would feel more sympathy with the journalists' complaints about the difficulty of rendering Donald Trump in print if their profession didn't have such an extensive and pervasive history of scandalously "approximate" quotations.

A too-long sample of documentation and discussion follows. If you want a quick version, try "Approximate quotations", 8/11/2012, where I pick a random political speech (by Mitt Romney) and show that not a single one of half a dozen randomly selected news reports managed to reproduce accurately even one of the brief word sequences in what they presented as direct quotations.

"What did Rasheed say?" (6/23/2005)

"Ritual questions, ritual answers" (6/25/2005)

"Ipsissima vox Rasheedi" (6/25/2005)

"Down with journalists!" (6/27/2005)

"Bringing journalism into the 21st century" (6/30/2005)

"More comments on quotes "(7/1/2005)

"Ethnograpy, journalism and interview rituals", 7/2/2005

"Linguists beware" (7/9/2005)

"Quotes from journalistic sources: unsafe at any speed" (7/9/2005)

"'Quotations" with a word error rate of 40-60% and more" (7/30/2005)

"This time it matters", 8/13/2005

"'Approximate' quotations can undermine readers' trust in the Times", 8/27/2005

"News and entertainment", 9/11/2006

"Journalists' quotations: Unsafe in any mood", 5/24/2007

"Audio photoshopping at NPR", 5/31/2007

"Standardizing non-standard language vs. careless misquotation", 8/12/2007

"In president, out president, fake president", 12/5/2008

"Filled pauses and faked audio", 12/28/2008

"More (dis)fluency and (in)coherence", 12/31/2008

"Egregious fabrication of quotes at the Sunday Times", 1/29/2010

"Jonah Lehrer, Bob Dylan, and journalistic unquotations", 8/3/2012

"More unquotations from the New Yorker", 8/4/2012

"Approximate quotations", 8/11/2012

"Quote approval and accurate quotation", 9/18/2012

"Journalistic quotation accuracy", 8/21/2013

Permalink