I saw what you did there!
September 1st, 2008
Political content of the article aside, when I see something like this in a NY Times Article, it raises some questions:
“The fact is, John McCain had a thorough search and made the decision to add Sarah Palin to the ticket because he believes” that she “will change America,” Mr. Schmidt said.
What was it that they had to replace with ‘that she’ in the middle of the quote? Was it just a bit of bad phrasing? If so why did they bail Mr. Schmidt out? I mean, it’s not likely to be something to make political hay out of. I just wonder. Did he say ‘Sarah Palin, divine goddess, my hope and inspiration’ and they just didn’t think it scanned? I want to know these things when they correct their source’s phrasing.
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:58 am
Maybe I’m wrong, but generally if they’re just correcting the phrasing, don’t they [bracket] their correction but keep it within the quotation marks? This looks more like they may have conflated two quotations – or at least replaced considerably more than the couple of words they threw in there.
Weird.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:04 pm
That’s true. It could be that they felt like the first half digressed into spin, and the second part was said later and acted as a short form of it.
Still, it seems to be a way of displaying the text that inherently makes it seem disingenuous.