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Abstract
The journalist usually introduces the voices of different people—sources, witnesses, and protagonists—into the writing of the news. This makes studying how oral discourse is translated into writing, along with the consequent ethical implications that this implies, a very interesting field within journalism. This article, limited to Spain, shows that while newspaper stylebooks and news-writing manuals require that direct quotes be textual transcriptions of the words of the person quoted, research conducted by Spanish scholars whose background is in linguistics shows that direct quotes in print media sometimes change with respect to the actual words used by the quoted speaker. This creates two problems: first, the risk that some readers may interpret erroneously the direct quotes in the news, as literal transcriptions of the words said, when that is not always the case. Second, that news-writing textbooks do not train journalists for the use of others' voices in the news they report.
Acknowledgements
This article is part of the research project “Teoría y análisis de los discursos: estrategias persuasivas y de interpretación”, funded by University of Navarra's PIUNA. I acknowledge with gratitude the help given by Professor Juan Ramón Muñoz-Torres, whose constructive comments were very useful for improving the original manuscript. I also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their remarks and suggestions.
Notes
1. Reported Speech “studies the way words attributed to different persons other than the principal speaker are presented in discourse” (Maingueneau and Charaudeau, Citation2005, p. 184). Although the analysis of discourse devotes some attention to hybrid forms (i.e., small textual fragments enclosed in parentheses or summaries that include quotations), the classical forms of presenting the words of third-party speakers in a text are the indirect, direct and free styles of citation (Maingueneau and Charaudeau, 2005).
2. Journalistic writings group themselves by genre, which opens distinct possibilities for the journalist and generates different expectations in the readers. For the purpose of this article, reports, interviews, profiles and all the spectrum of non-fiction journalism are not included.
3. Other names are also used to refer to these newspaper publications; for example, Manual de estilo (Style Manual) (El Diario Vasco), Manual of Style and Usage (The New York Times), Libro de redacción (Manual of the Newsroom) (La Vanguardia). The more general title of “stylebook” is opted for in this article.
4. The stylebooks' sample used in this article is almost exhaustive: ABC (1995, 8th reprint of the 1st edn, 1993), Barcelona: Ariel. ABC (2001, 2nd edn), Ana Vigara and Editorial Board, Barcelona: Ariel. El Mundo (1996), Madrid: Unidad Editorial. La Voz de Galicia (2002), La Coruña: La Voz de Galicia SA. El País (1999, 15th edn), Madrid: Ediciones El País. Vocento (2003), Gijón: Ediciones Trea. El Periódico de Catalunya (2002), Barcelona: Ediciones Primera Plana. Libro de redacción de La Vanguardia (2004), Barcelona: Ariel. There are two other stylebooks published by Spanish newspapers of general information: El Correo Español–El Pueblo Vasco (1986, Bilbao: Bilbao Editorial) and El Diario Vasco (1994, San Sebastián: Sociedad Vascongada de Publicaciones). But both newspapers are owned by Vocento, the media group which published in 2003 the stylebook for all of their newspapers. Two newspapers which are no longer running—Diario 16 and El Sol—also had stylebooks, but just for newsroom use.
5. In fact, the preoccupation with the correct use of language led to the publication of the first stylebook in Spain, the Manual de Español Urgente by the EFE news agency (1975), and it maintains an important place among the stylebooks currently in use (Martínez Albertos, Citation1997, pp. 335–6; Citation2008).
6. There is a fact that confirms the book's main objective: the consultants. Fernando Lázaro Carreter, at that moment the Real Academia's Director, worked on the first edition; and Vigara Tauste, a professor of Spanish, was the coordinator of the team that worked on the second edition.
7. Muñoz-Torres (Citation2000, Citation2007) has compellingly argued for the importance of newspaper stylebooks that “bear on issues relating to professional judgement, that is to say, on underlying criteria which are the basis of journalistic work” (2007, p. 224). They are rife with many underlying assumptions that show that some of the main usual procedures of the newsmaking process lack theoretical soundness. This is also true of many linguistic assumptions that lie behind the ways of quoting, wrongly presented as unproblematic.
8. Outside the usual news field, the El Mundo stylebook allows the freedom of reconstructing quotes in reports: “Reconstructed or compound quotes by the same author about the source of data obtained from the participants in conversations or meetings in which the same author was not present have become a a frequent resource in journalistic books on both sides of the Atlantic. This practice is forbidden in El Mundo when they are news or reports about events. It might be allowed in wider reports only if it is stated clearly and in the introduction of the same text about the nature of these reconstructed dialogues, which can be understood partially as a literary text and partially as an informative one” (Libro de estilo, pp. 102–3).
9. I have selected the manuals most frequently used in introductory courses to journalism and journalistic writing. The list could be expanded (for a larger sample, cf. López Pan, 2002b), but they are generally in agreement with one another, with some exceptions indicated later in the study. There are some classic manuals (Casasús Guri, Citation1988; Diezhandino, Citation1994; Gomis, Citation1989, 1991) and other more recent ones (López García, Citation1996, Moreno Espinosa, Citation1998; Vilamor, Citation2000) which do not raise questions relating to the use of quotations even indirectly.
10. Journalists might not be conscious of the changes to which they subject the quotes of their sources; perhaps, in the daily routines, they think they are writing a “literal transcription” of a phrase. It is also possible that the younger journalists become accustomed to this way of working and adopt it without a critical examination of the process. This, however, is only a hypothesis that would have to be tested.
11. It is reasonable to assume that the reader interprets as an exact reproduction whatever direct quotes appear in a journalistic text; however, as a hypothesis, this needs to be confirmed through research. We would have to ask a significant sample of readers from a particular community how they interpret the direct quotes they read in newspapers. Although it is from 1976 and based on research in the United States, there is one study showing that more than 80 percent of people think that speech marks mean literal transcription appears to be significant (cf. Culbertson and Somerick, Citation1976).
12. As mentioned previously, indications and explanations/studies of other genres (particularly the interview) have not been taken into account here. Although the subject of this article is separate, the study carried out by Vidal (Citation1998) about interviews, taking into account professional practices and linguistic contributions—is especially revealing.
13. Keeping the focus in Spain, cf. Lozano et al. (Citation1989) and Calsamiglia and Tusón (Citation1999).