Here are two quotes from major publications. First, from a Wired profile of AI detector Pangram:

And, from a few months ago, NYMag on gifted and talented education:

(Emphasis mine.)

First, two notes on the quotes: the reference to "Spero" is modified to explain who he is, because that's discussed earlier in the article. Which hardly needs to be said: obviously, text in brackets implies a modification of the quote by the person doing the quoting, and in this case it's trivial to see why a selection midway through the piece would reference Spero without saying who he was. For the second quote: there are cases where a long blockquote adds some context, but there's a particular section that the quoter wants to draw readers' attention to. But sometimes, quotes already include bold, italics, etc. So it's traditional for the person doing the quoting to say that they added the emphasis.

It's actually a little hard to see what emphasis is being added, but both of the ellipses are in bold. "Full professors" is, in the original, "full professors at research-intensive universities," and even more strikingly, the second ellipsis elides "distinguished judges and lawyers."

Now, it's perfectly fine to use ellipses to drop things that don't fit the flow of the conversation. If someone starts to tell a story, goes on an irrelevant tangent midway through, and then returns to the flow of the story, it's helpful to the reader to cut that, and to give an indication that something was cut. But in this case, both of the changes actually change the meaning of the sentence, and in the same direction! In both cases, the author is making it look like the study had broader criteria for success than it actually did, in service of making the argument that childhood precocity doesn't lead to later success. (It does, of course; even if we treated the quote as true, a whole lot less than 12.3% of the general population hits that level of eminence.¹ ) This is pretty egregious. Anyone who checks can see that the quote is being edited in a misleading way, which means that the author is basically taking advantage of every reader who doesn't treat the writer/reader relationship as an adversarial, con artist/mark sort of situation. You just don't have to do this kind of thing if you write things you think are true, and you can't pull it off if you're writing for an audience you respect. Who'd want to make a living doing otherwise?

Anyway, while the second quote is a lot more dishonest than the first, they're both doing something similar, which ties into the nature of the quotation. Recording devices date back to the late 19th century, and ones that are compact enough to be a practical way to get verbatim quotes on the fly got popular in the 50s and 60s. Before that, we had shorthand (which has a long history; Plutarch says Cato trained scribes in some form of it to record the proceedings of the Roman Senate). But quotations appear in older literature than that. Thucydides even says he doesn't have verbatim texts and is doing his best to get the original point across. So, quotations have existed as a form of literate culture, separate from but inspired by the oral culture that produced the original speech. If these are reproduced in some poetic form, you can simultaneously believe that Menelaus was a real historical figure and that he didn't "uh" and "umm" in flawless dactylic hexameter.

Once it was possible to record exactly what someone had said, this created a dilemma: when you write down what someone said, are you trying to make it sound like what they actually said, or trying to make it sound like a quote? The norm was to do the latter; when Joseph McCullaugh did the first interview with a President, Andrew Johnson, he didn't take any notes until he'd slept on it, and then presumably wrote a cleaned-up version of what he originally got.

If you can quote people verbatim or not, it offers a lot of room to choose how they'll be interpreted. Consider two answers to an interview that broaches the topic of why someone stopped working with a former creative partner. "We had creative differences and ultimately decided to pursue separate projects" is one way to put together a quote. Another might be something like this:

He paused for a few seconds. "We had some, uh, creative differences, and then went—and then decided to pursue, um," another pause, "separate projects."

The natural interpretation of that second one is closer to "We hate each other but have decided that airing one another's dirty laundry in public would be a bad idea." Whereas the first one is bland enough that it might mean that, but probably means roughly what it says. If people choose their words carefully when they think they're at risk of being misinterpreted, they'll have more pauses and false starts, which means that whoever's quoting them can choose how untrustworthy the interview subject sounds.

This is a strange example of path-dependence. In a world where recordings somehow predated the written word, we might have the expectation that all interviews would be perfectly verbatim, and that they'd be interspersed with narrative details. In that world, cleaned-up quotes would sound stiff and rehearsed. But in this world, they have continuity with the genre of reconstructed quotes, not verbatim transcripts. Other than "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," which makes a lot more sense if you say "for a man," we generally translate quotes into a literate rather than oral form.²

The way to rescue journalists' freedom to tell you whether someone scratched their nose or didn't make eye contact while saying something, to include or omit pauses, to transcribe every false start and minor grammatical error, is to treat the whole thing as a three-way relationship, between the speaker, the writer, and you, the reader. Everyone comes into this with their own biases and agenda, and a hostile writer is no more exceptional than a hostile reader. If you're capable of reading something specifically to find all the ways you'll disagree with it—if you hate-clicked on something that generated some hate-views which were monetized at some hatred-indifferent CPM, you are implicitly capable of hate-quoting someone by reproducing every single syllable they said and all of the actions you noticed them taking while they said it.

But that also means that clean, straightforward quoting is a literary device that omits some of the truth to get a more truthful output. There are judgment calls involved, but once you know what to look for, you know exactly what it looks like when a reporter is using something nominally factual to advance a particular narrative.

This phenomenon is part of the broader Diff beat on media, including:

• The AI trust paradox ($) argues that LLMs make it easier to lie convincingly, which means that it's a great time to demonstrate how trustworthy you are—the tools we can use to check will only get better.

• In credentialism and the money illusion, we consider whether credentials, brand names, and the like follow a credit cycle.

• AI creates a bull market in facts and a bear market in narratives.

• Video clips of fights and arrests have selection bias by default ($): people start filming after a conflict starts, which means that viewers fill in their assumptions about who is to blame.

• Writers with a large corpus are vulnerable to hostile, out-of-context quotes ($).

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1  It's also true that it's very hard to study this kind of thing well. There are intense parent-based selection effects early on; parents who choose to can push their kids incredibly hard in one academic domain and get them far ahead of peers, while kids whose parents don't use that tactic will take longer to find what they're great at, and will be less likely to have parental PR assistance, extra tutoring, and the like. So at any age cohort where someone could be described as "a prodigy," rather than just "smart," selection effects should lead to some reversion to the mean. Late-bloomers exist, too. So the statistics don't foreclose individual opportunities. But they do tell you that, to the extent that people start being high-achievers at some point in life, it's often early.

2  There are cases where there's a famous quote that's famous because of a misstep, like Richard Daley saying "Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all—the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder." But nobody references that quote as Mr. Daley's emotionally moving statement about the role of law enforcement in civil society. And it's notable that these slips both date to the era of live television, and had plenty of viewers—so more people got their first exposure to the quote as a spoken line, rather than a printed one.