Quote Unquote – getting it straight with the Huffington Post and Mehdi Hasan

 

 

Interrupting my holiday one more time, I hope this will be my last thought, for now,  on the matter of Mr Mehdi Hasan and ‘What the Papers Say’. The matter will soon disappear into the corridors of the BBC, and may not emerge for some time. Patience, I keep telling myself, is a virtue.

 

But before we go, I’d like to ask again here, as prominently as possible, a question I’ve been asking since Mr Hasan posted his riposte to me in an article for the ‘Huffington Post’. I’m asking it here because I have asked Mr Hasan directly (I’ll tell you what his answer was in a moment). And I have asked the legal and public relations departments of the Huffington Post, and what I believe to be its editorial department though it is hard to contact and like many Internet organisations, doesn’t seem to have a phone number. I have also posted it as a comment on Mr Hasan’s article.

 

And I have yet to have a clear answer. The question is: Does Mr Hasan have a contemporaneous note of, shorthand or longhand, or a recording of, or a contemporaneous witness to, the words which he quotes me as having said in his article?

 

The quotation (and its context) are as follows : ‘Almost exactly three years ago, I rang Peter Hitchens, the Mail on Sunday columnist, who is a friend of a friend, to ask his advice. A right-wing, anti-Islam blog had edited together, totally out of context, various quotes from me speaking in front of a group of British Muslim students in Manchester and made me look like an ultra-Islamist loon. Would the right-wing tabloid press jump on this "story", I wondered? Would I end up appearing on the pages of, say, the Mail, under the headline of 'Extremist!"? "Don't be silly," replied Hitchens. "I don't think anything you've said is worthy of publication in a national newspaper. You've got nothing to worry about so you should just calm down." ‘

 

Note that the words attributed to me are unambiguously displayed within inverted commas. The convention on this is clear. This means direct quotation of actual words spoken, without addition or subtraction.  Direct quotation is the hard currency of journalism. If you have someone’s actual words, reliably recorded, then you have a very valuable commodity. But you do not say you have it when you do not. And you do not reproduce it in this form unless you can show that these were the exact words, incontrovertibly spoken by the person involved. This is easiest where the person has written them down, or said them on TV or radio, or at a meeting where they have been recorded on film and tape, or anywhere else where an independent, permanent record exists.  I can still recall, during the 1983 general election, the scrabbling with notebooks and tape recorders among the travelling press, to try to work out what the late Michael Foot (who tended to yell and rage in an up-and-down voice) had actually said at a meeting at Oxford Town Hall, which had quite a stormy echo. Various other politicians had been recorded saying very embarrassing things at such meetings during that bitter campaign,  meetings which were in those days unscripted and uncontrolled. Few if any of us were politically friendly to the poor old Labour leader.  Some of us *thought* Mr Foot had said something rather shocking about the late Lord Hailsham. But in the end, nothing was written because there wasn’t a good contemporaneous note or recording. And I should say this incident involved some of the most leathery and ruthless reporters, for some of the most, er, rumbustious newspapers in what was then Fleet Street. Leathery they may have been. They had entered many a stricken home, as Evelyn Waugh puts it in ‘Scoop’. But the rule remained the same : No note. No quote. No story.

 

In private or one-to-one conversations, it’s even harder. Interviews these days are generally recorded by both parties to avoid disputes, a practice which was started, I believe, by Tony Benn (he was also said, I think by the late great Alan Watkins, to have once possessed a magnetic loop which he would wave over the recorders of journalists he didn’t like or trust, to erase their tapes).  Totally private conversations between individuals are the most difficult. They’re private and based on trust. People are speaking freely on the assumption that their words will go no further.  People generally don’t take notes or record them. It would seem rude. Much political journalism is based on lunches (See my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ ) where the source of the story is never identified, and quotation doesn’t need to be verbatim.  Telephone conversations are even harder. There are quite strict rules about recording them, though I believe a good contemporaneous shorthand note is still considered acceptable as evidence.

 

Now, until quite recently, almost everyone in British journalism had been through a long apprenticeship in which they had learned this rule, usually on local weekly and evening papers. They learned ( I learned)  shorthand, and a speed of 120 words per minute was usually required. You had to get it right, especially in the legally sensitive area of court reporting, which was the meat and drink of local papers. You can report a lot of very interesting things in court, but you have to be accurate when you do it. Quotation had to be right, above all.

 

To this day, most reporters of my generation keep great bundles of old notebooks in case there is ever a query about a quotation.

 

You see how important this is.

 

Now, I’m not *disputing*, let alone *denying*  Mr Hasan’s quotation. It may be correct.  I’m in no position to be prescriptive about what I didn’t say. I have no note of my own words at the time, and I have learned to mistrust memory in such matters. But is Mr Hasan in a position to be so prescriptive about what I *did* say? I have explained in a previous post how I could have come to say the words he attributes to me.  But, my goodness, to someone who hadn’t read that explanation, there’s a bit of a ‘Gotcha’ element in the precise words ‘I don't think anything you've said is worthy of publication in a national newspaper.’

 

And as a result, I have a strong curiosity to know for certain that I said them.

 

Now, when I asked Mr Hasan by e-mail if he had a note of the words he says I spoke, he replied (before breaking off communication with me):’ I have a very vivid memory of our conversation on that July weekend in 2009’ . This isn’t a direct reply to the question, but it is the best I seem likely to get. I can only say that it leaves the question unresolved. Vivid memory is often , even so, wrong, and three years is quite a while. He also mentioned a third party who ‘remembers me telling him exactly what you said to me at the time.’. But this doesn’t really affect the matter. Both Mr Hasan and I are sure the conversation was on the telephone, so no third party could have heard precisely what I said or be able to vouch for it. He would at best have heard Mr Hasan’s version of the conversation, and couldn’t have been a witness of it.

 

I have repeatedly asked the Huffington Post about this, and will continue to do so. But I should point out one thing before I finish. My quarrel with Mr Hasan began when he caused to be read out, on the BBC, a quotation from an article by me. But, when it was read it out, three important words were missing. I have now embarked on the long road to discovering exactly how and why this happened. This, again, was a grave breach of normal conventions, and one for which the BBC has now (inadequately) apologised on air – a very rare thing for them to do and a sign of the seriousness with which they regard it.

 

Why did I make such a fuss? Why did the BBC apologise? Why am I still making such a fuss? Because it’s important. Accurate quotation is not some decorative feature. It is the ore, the core, the skeleton, the load-bearing part of journalism. I cannot begin to say how important it is. To Mr Hasan, (or plain ‘Hasan’, to use Mr Hasan's oen harsh style) and to the editor of the Huffington Post, I pose this question: do you have a contemporaneous note, to justify publishing those words in inverted commas? I shall keep asking. Count on it. In fact, you may quote me on it.