The question of quotes has come up once again. This piece by Daniel Okrent called The Quote, the Whole Quote and Nothing but the Quote
from the New York Times gives a pretty good discussion of news ethics regarding quotes. The Times policy states that it’s completely illegitimate to change the actual words of a quote

Readers should be able to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said,” according to the paper’s ”Guidelines on Our Integrity.” ”The Times does not ‘clean up’ quotations.

and the discussion makes it clear that it’s also illegimate to elide words or sentences from a quote without a clear indication that this has been done. In a newspaper, this would normally be done by separating the parts of the quote with additional text. In academic writing, it’s usually acceptable to mark an elision with dots … on the assumption that the omitted material was not relevant to the point being made.

This still leaves open the question of when a quote should begin and end. As Okrent observes a quote, by its nature, is always “taken out of context”.

except when a newspaper prints verbatim transcripts, all quotations are taken out of context. The context is the actual conversation or press conference in which words get uttered; the printed pages of a newspaper can only rudely duplicate it.

The rule Oklert suggests is that the quote cannot be shortened in a way that changes its meaning, for example by the omission of significant qualifications. The main discussion concerns a quoted statement by President Bush that ”I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that.” In fact, he said “If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that.” without stating precisely the conditions that would make such an amendment necessary. The NY Times had to apologise for this error, but the initial apology wasn’t considered unconditional enough – hence Okrent’s article.

All of this is of interest in view of the controversy over the (in)famously doctored quotation by Stephen Schneider which has been reproduced all over the blogosphere, in which Schneider is made out to advocate scientific fraud in the interests of the environment. I’ll post more about this shortly.