Here's Yesterday's Bushism at Slate:
"And the question is, are we going to be facile enough to change with—will we be nimble enough; will we be able to deal with the circumstances on the ground? And the answer is, yes, we will."—Washington, D.C., July 25, 2006
To Slate's credit, they point to the video of Bush's comments (referring to the material starting at 17:44). I followed the video and noticed that the transcript was incorrect; here's what I wrote to Slate (apologies for the typo in the parenthetical):
Today's column says, [quote omitted] .... Fortunately, it includes a link to the video.
I followed that link, and it turns out the transcription is mistaken. President Bush says:
"And the question is, are we going to be facile enough to change with the c—will we be nimble enough; will we be able to deal with the circumstances on the ground? And the answer is, yes, we will."—Washington, D.C., July 25, 2006.
I understand that you folks might still want to fault Bush for having cut off the word "conditions" (assuming this wasn't just a technical glitch (note that the audio might have some skips, see 18:10-18:16). But at least the transcript ought to be corrected, I think.
To my surprise, here's the message I got back from Slate:
Geoff (Jacob's Bushism researcher) followed up on this, and here's what he has to say.
Bush makes an audible, vague "c" sound in the video, very briefly. But he often makes a lot of sounds that don't end up in the White House transcript. Plenty of "uhs" and "ums" and sometimes real starts and stops to words or thoughts. And part of what the White House does to indicate that he's changing gear abruptly is they use those em dashes between disjointed points. We print their version faithfully and I think we have to. I'm glad we run video so that people can see how these things are actually delivered.
Bush's comment was widely quoted in the form in which it appeared in the White House release. I don't think Volokh would find it fair if we got into the business of "correcting" the White House transcript in this way.
This struck me as pretty remarkable: The video conclusively proves the transcript to be mistaken; whatever one may say about the "c" (and it seems to me clearly audible enough to be included), the transcript clearly omits the word "the." Yet Slate insists on continuing to cite the transcript, which is what I suspect 95+% of its readers will rely on) even though it's wrong.
I don't see how that could be proper. Even if Slate feels uncomfortable departing from the White House transcript — odd, given that it's quite entitled to transcribe the video itself — surely there'd be nothing wrong with noting that the transcript was mistaken. And it seems to me quite wrong to continue to use a transcript that one now knows to be in error.
Naturally, one could conclude that even the corrected version somehow shows a risible error on President Bush's part (assuming there's no video skip); I've never found such slips in extemporaneous speech to be particularly telling, but others may disagree. Still, I'd think a basic rule of journalism would be: When you give a transcript, give an accurate transcript, and if you learn that it's wrong (by comparing it with an actual live recording), correct it, even if you think that the error in the transcript is immaterial. That apparently is not Slate's view, though.
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What did your letter to the White House look like?
Aren't the Bushism articles closer to political humor than journalism? If so, why do you spend so much time (or so many words) writing about it?
I'll admit up fron that I never find Bushisms funny. And I don't find this one funny. But I guess the point they are trying to make is that Bush cut off his sentence in midstream, and then switched to a different sentence? (If that's not what's supposed to be funny, can someone please explain the funny part here?)
So what difference does it make if Bush cut off the sentence after "change with the c" instead of "change with"? Could Prof. Volokh please explain why he thinks that makes a difference?
The "joke" here is the use of the word "facile," which generally has a perjorative connotation different from what the President obviously intended to convey. Whether the conversational hiccup "the c" is concluded seems utterly immaterial to me.
Adam: It seems to me that publications that purport to provide actual quotes (as opposed to something that's clearly a made-up quote, as with some humor) have an obligation to get the quotes right, and to correct them if they've gotten them wrong. That obligation applies whether the article is intended to make a serious point, make a political point in a humorous way (which I take it the Bushisms column is trying to do), or just get a laugh. Am I wrong? Is it OK to knowingly convey false information -- information that will be perceived as true, rather than as clearly fictional -- simply because your article is "closer to political humor than journalism"?
On another note - Has Bernstein gone from censoring comments to completely disallowing them? How unblawgerly.
But my basic point is that, regardless of whether what he said was actually risible, magazines should try to be precise in reporting what President Bush (or anyone else) said -- and certainly not to continue quoting the person incorrectly once they learn that the quote is indeed incorrect. And it seems to me that Slate's failure to adhere to this principle is indeed noteworthy.
Anyway - I would posit that it IS a quotation. The Slate folks say they've taken it from a White House transcript. I take that to mean that the White House has put this transcript out in the world. To the extent that it's not completely consistent with what was actually said, I assume the White House has had the opportunity to review the document and takes no issue with the widely-held assumption that they stand by the statements therein as their own. Consequently, even if they didn't say it THEN, they're saying it NOW.
An analogy is one I've seen a few times with judges reading decisions into the record. They'll then review the transcript provided to them by the court reporter, edit it as they see fit, and then file that transcript on the docket.
The Slate people would be completely entitled to make their own transcript of the video (at least unless they think the video is wrong or ambiguous on some matter). If they changed the quote to reflect the actual video, no-one could fault them for it, precisely because it would be an accurate transcript of the document they do indeed cite. But what they cannot do, I think, is to continue providing the quote as if it were accurate when they know for a fact that it is not accurate.
First, you are, in effect, criticising Slate for having the audacity to rely on the official transcript from the White House?
Second, why in the world do you think
is better than
Third, how do you intuit that Bush was about to say the word "conditions"?
If all the tape reveals is a hard "c" sound, why not assume he was going to say Condi, or condom, or cupcake?
Granted, those may not make much sense, but if you belive that Bush's locutions make sense you don't listen to him much.
For whatever that's worth.
My preferences as a reader? That quotes in publications be accurate, and that once the publication learns that the transcript on which it was relying was wrong (no matter how official), it corrects the quote and gives readers the accurate words.
Now I understand both the concepts of the hypothetical and its possible relationship to the concept of billable hours! :)
Agree with your para 1, not so para 2.
Why "yourself"? Shouldn't it be "itself"?
[EV: Yes, thanks, corrected it.]
What I wonder is what it takes for the average consumer of Western media to understand something to be a meticulous reproduction of something. For example, Bush sometimes affects a Texan accent, and Ted Kenneddy sometimes says things in a New England accent (e.g. "I have an idear about Americker" -- I have no idea if it's deliberate, but my gut feeling is no). I don't think most people care whether that gets represented in a transcript or not, yet you can make an argument that for Bush, the way he says something and the particular context he says it in is far more important than the words he chooses.
I wonder if photo journalism would make a good analogy -- when do you need to indicate that you tweaked something in Photoshop in order to keep the average person from feeling misled?
I make no claims to understanding what Slate thinks it's doing. I get the sense they are trying to highlight errors, but without commentary you never know. I'd like to see them posted with actual commentary from linguists or other language scholars. Incidentally, the only systematic attempt I have seen to go over Bush's linguistic errors was in Michael Silverstein's Talking Politics: The substance of style from Abe to “W.”. I believe he concludes they are all over the place, and aren't evidence of any particular language disorder.
newsworthy or even an error.
But, to call them on a mistaken transcript when they miss "the c". Yes, they could have corrected it, but I think you are in need of some vacation time. It makes you seem a little out there.
Precisely. Maybe you can start calling this regular debunkings "Slate-isms." If anything this shows the President's intelligence. Using a word correctly but realizing that many people would not be familiar with his intended use, he then restated his point for clarity.
After reading all of the responses above, I guess I come to the conclusion as others that, if your sole point is that Slate failed to correct something that is immaterial to Slate's article, then I don't see what the big deal is.
A failure to make an immaterial correction is itself immaterial.
That being said, please keep up your criticisms of Bushisms (when applicable, of course). I really enjoy them.
It seems to me that publications that purport to provide actual quotes (as opposed to something that's clearly a made-up quote, as with some humor) have an obligation to get the quotes right, and to correct them if they've gotten them wrong. That obligation applies whether the article is intended to make a serious point, make a political point in a humorous way (which I take it the Bushisms column is trying to do), or just get a laugh.
The obligation is strict only when an article intends to make a serious point and does so in a serious article. In such cases the obligation is strict because people will and should rely on the article for fact, which shouldn't vary within the context of a quote. If it does, the article's point is less trustworthy.
The obligation is less strict if the article intends to make a political point in a humorous way. This Bushism quote satisfied there obligation because it was close enough. The quote was close enough to provide supposed political humor (I didn't find it funny) without severely misrepresenting President Bush. The lack of accuracy doesn't undermine the point because their point's vehicle is humor, an inherently less trustworthy vehicle than a serious article.
If an article is just trying to get a laugh, then there is no obligation to quote accurately. In such cases, there is no expectation that anything is accurate.
If we see that Bush said something different than what was on the transcript, that is the only thing that should matter. What could possibly be the relevance of the fact that the original transcript didn't have it right?
Regardless of the convention, it seems to me Slate shouldn't use mistaken transcripts when running an article about Bushisms which purport to show us how incoherent the President is.
If they feel uncomfortable correcting the transcript they should dig a bit deeper to find something incoherent Bush actually said! The practice of relying on transcription errors suggests they are having a very difficult time finding incoherent bits of speech.
This would seem pretty remarkable since most people utter at least a few incoherent sentences a day, Bush is admittedly not eloquent and he is constantly recorded. But maybe Slate's writers are just lazy?
It is my opinion that the video was edited. If you watch Bush's lips at the moment of the cut there is a weird tremor/stutter. If you listen to the audio the "C..." sound has a distinctly non-human ending - it seems to have been cut off electronically.
q=YTliZTcwMTUwNDgxZTliZmY1YjgyM2FiZDJlYmJjYTg=
Perhaps Justice Stevens SHOULD have relied on the actual CSPAN tape.
I at one point owned a style guide that noted that while beginning a question with "Whom" can be technically correct, it sounds pretentious, and should be avoided, and that "Who" in that case was now considered universally correct. Alas, I no longer have the guide to provide you with the source. A quick Googling shows that it's not a unique standpoint, however.
Back to the original topic, I agree that Slate is wrong to publish incorrect transcripts. Unfortunately, doing so is now standard journalistic practice. It was reported some years ago that the White House has a policy of "correcting" Bush's transcripts to reflect what he meant to say, as opposed to what he said, and I know of no publication that has decided to make a policy of checking the accuracy of the transcripts against recordings in response, possibly due to fear of political retaliation.
In any case, I wonder if this is the moment at which Slate's Bushism jumps its own little shark. Criticizing the president for speaking standard English? The column has become a parody of itself.
Heh, well, the problem is, the written transcript can also be falsified.
I think it's a fair criticism of the Prof. that he's criticizing Slate but not the White House. It is fair to infer from the official transcript that the White House endorses the version presented by Slate as more consistent with what the President meant to say. Should they footnote their quotation indicating that the official transcript departs from the actual audio? Perhaps. But then, so should the White House.
Zed: I realize the "whom" is a little pedantic-sounding; and in fact the item to which the post's title alludes is usually rendered as "who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?" The uptight maximum grammatical punctilio of my title was a little joke (a very little joke). But I am pretty sure that while the title sounds stuffy, it's not wrong.
With this in mind, I think the humor is a little more obvious (my dictionary actually has a picture of GWB next to this definition, ha ha, kidding, EV please don't write any letters to Slate about me :P). Calling our victory in Iraq 'facile', with this definition in mind, does a little more than just hint at our administration's 'ignoring the true complexities of an issue'. To me, anyway. Sorry you didn't get the joke, Eugene.
If a document is factually wrong - it misstates what someone said or wrote or includes incorrect facts - don't use the erroneous material.
Is Slate now in the practice of uncritically repeating White House material? (tongue in cheek)
SMG
It's funny that Bushisms (and liberals more generally) attempt to show Bush as dumb, yet elide the fact that Bush shows an uncommon knowledge of the word facile. It's somewhat ironic.
Bush used the word facile in the election debates in talking about our troops. I was watching at the law school and a liberal student sitting next to me guffawed, assuming Bush made a vocabulary mistake, when in fact it was the student whose vocabulary was limited.
Sure, people can say that Bush and others should be smart enough not to use words that are easily confused because of close-to-opposite meanings, but then I expect such people will not be using words like 'sanction,' or 'cleave' either.
Maybe it was supposed to be a reference to the Dixie Chicks?
It reminds me of the recent video where Bush gives a quick neck massage to German Chancellor Merkel. The video shows her recoiling in surpise, but the LA times says she "smiled" at the gesture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzv2FF9BItA
This is why I brought up Neil Armstrong's famous quote of 7/20/1969: According to the most accepted historical record, and Armstrong's own insistence, it is "one small step for a man," yet, the best modern forensic analysis tools, applied to the original NASA tapes, can find no evidence of the "a" anywhere in there.
Berstein nuked tons of my (incredibly insightful) commentary the other day on the ground that it was "non-substantive." Basically I was taking him to task for his apparently endless, analysis-devoid "hey look at this" posts of meaningless unblogworthy materials related to the conflict in Lebanon. (And I largely agree with his views on the underlying topic, for what that's worth.)
You'll have to take my word for it, obviously, but my comments were in no way insulting or abusive, and were FAR FAR less snarky than much of what I read in the VC.
I noticed a few other people in the thread, even without the benefit of my Pulitzer-quality prose, started making similar criticisms.
Perhaps that's why he's cut off comments entirely.
Don't get me wrong. It makes perfect sense to post material for discussion and then delete portions of the discussion when you determine it to be "non-substantive." After all, we can't have people making up their own minds about such things. Cutting off comments entirely is the logical next step.
``Facile'' has the meaning he wants, but also has an unwanted meaning, so after it came up, he rejected it and replaced it, having heard its unwanted meaning called out by political context that he wasn't thinking of.
It's what you'd call normal speech. In fact, somewhat better, lacking the false starts that most speech actually contains throughout.
If you someday take a recording and try to transcribe every ah, um, and restart, you'll be a little surprised how much of it there is as a percentage. But you'll be dumbfounded how difficult it is to do. Everybody is wired not to hear it. Fifty replays of a phrase may not suffice to get the transcription right, as to what restarts are there and what order they happen in.
Further, it becomes incredibly difficult to read. The mind is trained (or perhaps genetically preprogrammed) to disregard such guffaws when listening, but not when reading.
If indeed, you are a former journalist do you subscribe the old aphorism, "journalism is the first draft of history"?
Yes, I am a former reporter (local/state issues in several states) and, as Hemingway pointed out, journalism is the first draft of history. And with all first drafts, it often needs revision and correcting.
As we all know, original or source material is sometimes wrong. That's why, among other things, publishers issue revised editions of works - to fix errata.
If the source material is wrong, you don't go with it. That's not Journalism 101, that's Common Sense 101.
SMG
An extremely good point. One wonders if this would have caught Eugene's interest, had it been a routine account of one of Bush's speeches - speeches which, as we all know, are rife with malaprops - rather than one intended to highlight them?
"We [Northeast Archives] no longer require such detail, partly because of our conviction that the tape is the primary document and anyone requiring that level of accuracy would be a fool to trust someone else's transcriptions." Edward D. Ives, The Tape-Recorded Interview.
The standard for transcription is accuracy for the purpose of the transcript. The start of the "c" word is proper to transcribe if the purpose of the transcription is a dialection wants the transcription one way, a historian another, a psychologist another. And even with the same instructions, ten transcribers will create ten different versions, and that's at 15 hours of transcription for every hour of tape. It is close to standard for transcribers to delete false starts.
In this case, the audio link is enough for everybody, and the official White House transcript conveys Bush's message accurately without making it difficult to read. I don't want Slate or Volokh changing the official record unless there's a significant point to the change, and if so, footnoting the change.
A classic was:
"Brandeis was concerned about marrying Frankfurter."
Ears lie as do eye witnesses. I want the tape and the video and outside consultation and research.
The above quote was later changed to:
"Brandeis was concerned about Marion Frankfurter."
If that's the "joke", though, wouldn't it be better if it was at least in some small way funny?
About the transcript stuff, if an audiotape is introduced at trial, played for the jury, and transcribed by the court reporter, I regard the tape as the final word. In other words, if I have to cite to the tape in a brief, I'll use the transcript fo simplicity's sake, but the tape wins out if there are any discrepancies.
No matter - as this thread has shown (so far), there are other ways to raise a fuss...
I've been a medical transcriptionist for the past 25 years, and I would have handled it about the same way even if it is a direct quote. It does not change the meaning and is edited for ease of reading and understanding.
Maybe a guest blog by Tony Snow is in order.
EV correctly states that facile can mean "Working, acting, or speaking with effortless ease and fluency". However, when this meaning is intended in describing a person or group of people (as opposed to an action), the word is very seldomly used without qualification. Typically when used in this sense, further qualification is provided (e.g. he is facile with mental math, we are in a facile posture, etc).
Pretty agile thinking on his part, IMO. And Slate thinks this is a Bushism?
Holy cow! I can't believe my comments were seen by someone before being blasted away by Bernstein's itchy "deleting finger." I timed one of them, and he deleted it within no more than 15 minutes. Incredible.
Thanks for the kind words. Thank God (er.... goodness?) EV doesn't seem to mind when I use one of his threads to rant about DB and otherwise aggrandize myself. :)
I think DB is particularly sensitive to criticisms that he is going overboard because.... he is going overboard.
I have to grant this to you, Eugene: while this seemed incredibly stupid at the outset, it's proven to be an interesting topic of discussion.
Is the purpose of all this really to criticize bad journalism? Or is it just some kind of obsessive compulsive tic that can't be helped? Frankly it would make more sense to me if it were the latter.