: It's conventional to drop the "umm"s and "you know"s and correct obvious grammar errors. Like if someone says in a speech "Senator Jones say he will ..." I think most reporters would correct

@Annie587

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It's conventional to drop the "umm"s and "you know"s and correct obvious grammar errors. Like if someone says in a speech "Senator Jones say he will ..." I think most reporters would correct that to "Senator Jones SAYS he will ..." with no hesitation.

Similarly, when people are speaking, they often repeat themselves and generally ramble. It's routinely considered fair to leave out repetitions and to compress unnecessarily verbose speech. Like, suppose a speaker said, "Albert Einstein was, he was a great scientist, I'm sure we all agree, yes, a great scientist, and, anyway, what I wanted to say, the point I was trying to make, is that he discovered relativity, I mean his first theory, the general theory of relativity, when, like, you know, he was working as a clerk, as a patent clerk, I mean a clerk at the patent office." A reporter might well quote this as, "Albert Einstein was a great scientist. He discovered the general theory of relativity while working as a patent clerk." Few would challenge that "clean up" of the quote.

In my opinion, going much beyond that is not legitimate. Changing the meaning of what the person said is dishonest and misquoting -- whether you are changing it to make the person you are quoting look better or look worse.

That said, many reporters disagree with this completely. There was a court case a few years back -- Masson vs New Yorker -- where Mr Masson was interviewed for a magazine article and sued the reporter for libel on the grounds that many of the supposed quotes from him differed dramatically from what he actually said. The courts ultimately concluded that although the article did pretty much invent quotes and put them in Mr Masson's mouth to make him look bad, this was not libel because the invented quotes were "rationally related" to things Mr Masson actually said. My favorite: according to court transcripts of the tape of the interview, Mr Masson, a psychologist, was talking about Freud's old house and said, "Freud's library alone is priceless in terms of what it contains: all his books with his annotations in them; the Schreber case annotated, that kind of thing. It's fascinating." The reporter quoted this as, "[Freud's house] would have been a center of scholarship, but it would also have been a place of sex, women, fun."

I think there's a murky middle ground on slips of the tongue and simple factual errors. Like if a historian made a reference to Andrew Jackson when in context it is clear that he is talking about Andrew Johnson, and there is no indication that he has the two men confused, it was just a slip of the tongue, I think it's fair to fix the name without comment. But in other cases, fixing someone's mistakes might amount to an attempt to hide the fact that the speaker doesn't have his facts straight and doesn't know what he's talking about. And I'm sure there are cases where a writer "fixes" statements that were in fact originally correct and the writer has now made them wrong. So I'd be very cautious about such corrections.

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