In my piece for the NYT found here examining Simpson's stunning fall from grace, I quote Simpson attorney Yale Galanter as saying:
“I don’t like to use the word payback,” said Mr. Simpson’s lawyer, Yale Galanter. “I can tell you from the beginning my biggest concern was whether or not the jury would be able to separate their very strong feelings about Mr. Simpson and judge him fairly and honestly.”
That's an accurate quote, as you can hear for yourself because I posted the raw audio of the Galanter post-verdict press conference in our podcast feed. You can click here to hear it. This comment comes up within the first two or three minutes.
But on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's site, the same paragraph here reads:
"This was just payback," Simpson lawyer Yale Galanter said Saturday. "They were on an agenda."
WHAT!??!? That's completely, utterly not what this man said. And, also, he said it Friday night, not Saturday.
How the &%&#@ does this HAPPEN? I'm not even sure what to do about it. Here's the screen shot:
Somebody needs to lose their job. This is a journalistic nightmare.
4 comments:
It looks like a Strib copy editor took the quote from an AP story, but forgot to add a tagline noting that material from other wire services was used in the piece.
You can find your mystery quote here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081004/ap_on_re_us/oj_simpson
Damn. I frequently have to change quotes to create complete sentences because I'm dealing with athletes, some of whom aren't native English speakers. But that's just silly.
so one day the lawyer says i dont want to use the word payback and the next day he says this was payback? something odd is going on here...
Read these more closely. They say the same thing. The first quote is a weasely, back-door, lawyer-ish way of saying what the second one states more clearly. The story should have had a tagline saying wire copy was used, but that's about it.
It's like if someone says, "I don't want to say he's a liar, but ... "
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