Around direct quotes. You use them when you’re quoting the exact words someone said. Not when you’re quoting what someone’s rumored to have said, or alleged to have said, and not when you’re paraphrasing what someone said.
That’s pretty basic reporting 101 stuff, which makes Jonathan Weisman’s recent post on washingtonpost.com rather embarrassing. According to Weisman’s unnamed source, Obama told House Democrats that “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions” but Weisman wasn’t there, there’s no tape and nobody has gone on the record confirming the quote (and one staffer, also anonymous, has given a slightly different version).
Under those circumstances, surely the appropriate way to phrase this would have been something like “A source who attended the speech said ‘What I heard Obama say was that he had become a symbol …’” so that Weisman would have been clearly presenting the quote as the source’s memory, not as a verified fact.
Maybe this is the kind of thing only journalists worry about, but I am one, so …
Hat tip to Daily Howler for reporting on this.
