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Beware the Out-of-Context Quotation

September 3, 2010 – That's the lesson of a couple of recent cases in which video clips were used to give misleading impressions of what the speaker actually said.

By now, everyone's familiar with the recent controversy over Shirley Sherrod, the African-American U.S. Department of Agriculture official who was fired after a right-wing blogger posted a video depicting her as a racist who refused to help a white farmer. In fact, the clip was an excerpt from a speech in which Sherrod discussed the need to move beyond race and how she ended up helping the farmer. Sherrod is now contemplating a defamation suit against the blogger.

And just last week a federal appeals court reinstated a televangelist's libel suit against ABC-TV. The Rev. Frederick Price sued the network and reporter John Stossel after ABC's "20/20" news magazine show posted a clip that appeared to show Price boasting of his wealth. In fact, Price was speaking in hypothetical terms about a rich man who felt spiritually unfulfilled because he had lost his faith.

The District Court had dismissed the case on the grounds the clip was substantially true because Price is, in fact, extremely wealthy and preaches a "prosperity gospel" predicated on the notion that God bestows material wealth on those he favors. But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit disagreed. Citing Masson v. New Yorker Magazine Inc., a 1991 Supreme Court case, the panel wrote:

"Even if a fabricated quotation asserts something that is true as a factual matter, the fabrication may nonetheless 'result in injury to reputation because the manner of expression or even the fact that the statement was made indicates a negative personal trait or an attitude the speaker does not hold.' [citation omitted] These observations are particularly relevant here because Price's quotation was published using a medium in which the viewer actually sees and hears the plaintiff utter the words."

The cases are instructive because reporters, editors, bloggers, advertisers and other content creators nearly always use quotes selectively. Modern technology makes it virtually effortless to edit video- and audiotapes to suit a particular editorial objective. The trick is to use them without distorting their intended meaning. To paraphrase an old adage, if you don't have something nice to say, make sure you back it up with contextually accurate quotes.