« Kill Bill: Vol. 1 | Main | Frying Pan »

And I Quote

Thu., April 5, 2007

I wanted to source the quote “News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising” and what better reference than the internet. Or not.

Unbeknownst to me, this “news/advertising” aphorism is stockpiled often by those grubby quote-compilation sites, nearly none of which ever source anything. I like sourcing. I need sourcing. It’s my journalistic background tapping my shoulder.

Google muddied the waters. One site alleged the words were spoken/written by Harold Evans, an editor of the London Times. An Australian site begged to differ, offering Henry Northcote, also known as “the first Baron Northcote.” The majority of the sites pinned the quote on Rubin Frank, billed as a former NBC News president, except that his name isn’t Rubin it’s Reuven. And there are a growing number of sites purporting the quote to be one from Bill Moyers. It’s easy to see how this evolved: a 2003 article in the Christian Science Monitor quoted Moyers as saying “We’re trying to get the truth behind the news.... Someone once said that news is what’s hidden; everything else is advertising.” And before you know it, sites were attributing the quote to Bill. According to one of these:

“I came to see that news is what people want to keep hidden, and everything else is publicity.”

—Bill Moyers in speech responding to charges by Kenneth Tomlinson of liberal bias at PBS.”)

In short, sourcing stuff on the badlands of the net can be a futile exercise. Take a browse through urban-legend debunker Snopes.com to find many examples of attributable text that, seemingly the instant your Mom emails it to her bridge group, suddenly gets misattributed, added to, deleted from, then misattributed some more, like, most classically, that Mrs. Fields cookie recipe or more recently, this Dave Barry list. Why would someone mangle something written by someone else or switch attributions for no discernable reason? “Dropped on their heads at birth, perhaps?” guesses Barry.

But this is the natural progression of notable quotes, merely sped by technology. There was a great article by Louis Menand in the February 19th issue of The New Yorker, a review of the Yale Book of Quotations that notably notes, “Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.” At length:

Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in Casablanca says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; Vince Lombardi did say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” quite often, but he got the line from someone else. Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell”; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man.” Marie Antoinette did not say “Let them eat cake”; Hermann Göring did not say “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun”; and Muhammad Ali did not say “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”; James Cagney never says “You dirty rat” in any of his films; and no movie actor, including Charles Boyer, ever said “Come with me to the Casbah.” Many of the phrases for which Winston Churchill is famous he adapted from the phrases of other people, and when Yogi Berra said “I didn’t really say everything I said” he was correct.

Here’s where the smoothness comes into play:

What Michael Douglas did say in Wall Street was “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” That was not a quotable quote; it needed some editorial attention, the consequence of which is that everyone distinctly remembers Michael Douglas uttering the words “Greed is good” in Wall Street.

I know what Menand’s saying. An English professor of mine in college frequently used the quote, “We live by selected fictions,” which he attributed to Lawrence Durrell. It was one of my favorites then (and still) though I wavered when I read Durrell’s novel Balthazar years later and discovered the actual wording is the much more prosaic and less memorable:

“We live,” writes Pursewarden somewhere, “lives based upon selected fictions.”

Essence distilled, lesson learned. I must adapt to live with misattribution and inaccuracy, at least in my spicy quotes.

Tags: Media | Comments have been closed.