From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.
As far as the press is concerned, they're going to say what they want to say. Probably about 10-15 percent of the time It's accurate.
90% of what we did the Press didn't know about, and 90% of what they did know about they got wrong.
I've been really upset sometimes when I've been misquoted. And it's the one thing they use in big print. Or it's taken out of context. Thoughts are fluid and words are sticky. That's the thing.
One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
I've been so mutilated by a lot of articles. I know I haven't said a lot of things I'm quoted as saying in the papers.
It wasn't just one journalist getting it wrong, everybody was getting it wrong.
God - if the press ever quoted anyone correctly, it would be brilliant.
During MySpace's run-up, journalists continually got their facts wrong about MySpace. They wrote story after story about how Facebook was bigger than MySpace when in truth Facebook wasn't even 1/10th the size of MySpace.
I've been doing interviews for years, and in all that time, I've virtually never read one and gone, 'Yep, factually and tonally that's exactly what happened.' Pretty much never.
