What newly appointed White House policy advisor Karl Zinsmeister is accused of doing — altering his quotes in a news story and then publishing the new version on The American Enterprise’s web site — is bad enough. But what he did when confronted with his mistake — defending his actions by claiming that he was only correcting instances in which the reporter had misquoted him – is even worse. Regardless of whether he was actually misquoted, he owes the reporter an apology.
I can tell you, there is nothing more frustrating than being falsely accused of misquoting someone. It is enraging. You know you’ve gotten the quotes right, but you have very little ability to defend yourself, especially if you don’t have an audio recording. If, as the reporter in this case maintains, Zinsmeister is making a false accusation, he has compounded his original error exponentially.
If he really was misquoted (which, I’ll grant, is also enraging), he chose the absolute worst way to handle it. The proper way is to seek as soon as possible some sort of correction from the news organization that has misquoted you. In this case, Zinsmeister actually sent the reporter an e-mail praising his work. His defense now is that he did not want to get the reporter in trouble with his editor. If true, there is nothing noble about this defense — Zinsmeister did the reporter a disservice by shielding him from the consequences of his mistakes, allowing him to go on carelessly misquoting others and possibly getting into real trouble further down the line. Whether his accusation is true or false, he owes the reporter an apology for airing his greivences only now when the heat is on him for a mistake that he made.
UPDATE: More here.