BY PHILIP WEISS
Philip Weiss is a free-lance writer who often writes about the news media.

"Our public is people who love pictures, not the guy who never steps into a museum -- I don't give a shit what he thinks," William Rubin said, reflecting on his two decades as director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. Actually that's not what Rubin said. What he said was, "Our public is people who love pictures, not the guy who's at McDonald's but never steps into a museum -- I don't give a shit what he thinks."

I changed the quote when I was writing up my interview with Rubin for Art in America because Rubin insisted on it. Using "McDonald's" made him sound too elitist, he said, and he had only granted the interview on the condition that he could approve quotes.

I've broken the agreement here because the practice it exemplifies seems to me to be so widespread that it deserves more attention. (I can further justify, or rationalize, doing so because CJR does not serve Rubin's public, the art world.) Quote approval is the latest twist in the art of getting someone to talk, and it has gained the same tacit acceptance from journalists that anonymous quotation got twenty years ago. The practice clearly has a price, but, like other arrangements, involving quotation, including the cleaned-up nature of most published quotes (see "The, Uh, Quotation Quandary," CJR, May/June 1990), no one likes to acknowledge or discuss it.

First, a definition. By "quote approval" I mean an agreement struck during an interview requiring the journalist to read back what he or she is attributing to the source before the article goes to press. The agreement may also entail telling the source the context in which the quote is to be used. In the follow-up phone call there's negotiation over what will be used, and how. The result is that the source has successfully involved himself or herself in the writing process at a late stage, often when the reporter is sitting at the computer terminal. (At times, I've discovered, this process can involve the collaborative crafting of a quote.)

The practice seems to have evolved as an elaboration of other sourcing concessions. "We enter into agreements with sources constantly," says Richard Harwood, the ombudsman for The Washington Post. "We will agree to talk on background, we will agree to talk on deep background, we will agree to talk off the record. As to whether [reporters] will agree to check quotes back, I'm sure that at times they do."

Quote approval is quite different from that other encroachment on the reader's right to know -- anonymous sourcing. Anonymity is generally given to friendly sources, people who can advance a writer's thesis. Quote approval, on the other hand, tends to be demanded by subjects who are the focus of potential criticism -- like William Rubin and the other museum directors I interviewed, whose decisions to sell off art works from their museums' permanent collections so they can buy new ones have drawn enormous attention. "There are two choices a reporter has," Kirk Varnedoe, Rubin's replacement at the Museum of Modern Art, told me when I asked him about his quote-approval policy. "The reporter can say, 'No, I will not call you back on quotes,' in which case I will practically write out everything I'm saying so I can make sure that it will be exactly what I meant to say, or he can agree to call back, in which case I get to say, 'That's not . . .' 'If you had the sentence before that, it would change it. . . .'"

Varnedoe's bargaining stance, of course, contains an implicit threat: I don't have to talk to you. Rubin was explicit when I asked him about his motivation. "After some bad experiences, I simply took the position, Look, I'm not obliged to speak to anybody," he said. "And therefore if I'm going to speak to them at their request and they want to quote me, I want to insert into the situation something that gives me a fair chance of being correctly heard."

Possibly these two gunslingers of quotation are bluffing, but the curious thing is that no one calls them on it. "People want to see the context of their quotes, and we can give them that," says Steven Henry Madoff, executive editor of ART-news. "This is something that's done, it's a standard thing to do." Varnedoe says, "It's a policy I follow across the board. I don't discriminate." Art critic Michael Kimmelman of the Times allows that he may have agreed to these terms. "I don't remember," he says. "It might be in Kirk [Varnedoe's] case that on the one or two occasions I've interviewed him for an article, that he asked me to read it back. I don't really remember that. But, I mean, he might. . . ."

The practice appears to be fairly widespread. A journalist friend reports that a recent interview with a State Department official was followed by several faxes back and forth in which he and the source struggled over the language that was to be attributed to the source. Congressman John D. Dingell, the powerful Michigan Democrat, made the request of me at the start of an interview last year (ostensibly so he could clean up his language), and, although I did not accede in that case, Dingell made it clear that many reporters quietly accepted the terms. Political stature has little to do with it. I got the same demand from William Wilson, former mayor of Rancho Mirage, California, as he sat in his son's patio-furniture store.

"I have heard that a lot more people wanted this," says Karen Elliott House, The Wall Street Journal vice-president and columnist. "I gather there is more pressure partly because people mistrust the press more and, as the press plays this game, word gets around and everyone feels cheated if they haven't [gotten these terms]. People will say, 'Well, Newsweek lets us do this.' The [Journal's] London bureau chief was rabid on the subject." House says the importance of "resisting" such claims "is less passionately indoctrinated now than before." ("We discourage our reporters from reading back quotations to sources," says Diana Pearson, communications director for Newsweek. "On some occasions, to avoid anonymous sourcing, we will read back a background quote in an effort to get it on the record.")

Quote approval is best understood as a marker of journalistic independence, or the lack of it. In the last few years the adversarial posture that had once been fashionable among reporters, epitomized by Joan Didion's memorable line "Writers are always selling somebody out," has given way to a more accommodating role. The city rooms of monopoly newspapers have the aura of insurance companies, and the romance that once surrounded investigative reporters today seems to have attached itself to journalists who write about celebrities and sometimes befriend them.

For another thing, the immediacy of television news makes print reporting seem that much more negotiable. Journalism may be the rough draft of history, but sources know that several revisions take place before the draft is circulated.

"Almost down to the last little hamlet in America people are incredibly media-savvy," says Jane Mayer, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. "You find people who don't even look like they've ever read a newspaper and the first thing they say to you is, 'This is off the record.'"

No surprise, then, that more high-profile subjects have evolved even more restrictive terms. When Mayer was reporting Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, she and co-author Doyle McManus, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, struck deals with several sources, agreeing to get their approval on quotes and, in some cases, context as well. Making the agreements raised questions in her mind but was necessary to gaining the sources' trust, she says.

"Sometimes reporters play a game to try to get people to hang themselves by saying something foolish," Mayer says. "I think that if you realize that what you're really trying to do is get people to give the essence of their thoughts the way they want their thoughts to come across, that's a fair reason for people to cooperate with an interview."

In the end, Mayer was pleased to find that her subjects, notably former national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane, actually strengthened their comments when they were shown the context in which their remarks appeared. Her losses struck her as minor -- for instance, when one source changed a characterization of an official from "plodding" to "thoughtful." All the same, she's aware she was "working around some sort of a journalistic taboo." Scratch just about any journalist and that taboo comes right to the surface. Karen Elliott House says, "We really feel passionately at the Journal that you tell everybody at the same time: no one should know what's in the paper ahead of the time we're published." When I repeated to Grace Glueck of The New York Times Kirk Varnedoe's assertion that he routinely obtains quote approval, she said, "That's baloney," before conceding that she may at times have run quotes past sources to check for possible misinterpretation or inaccuracy. "No, frankly I haven't encountered that," her colleague Michael Kimmelman said to me at first -- until I asked him specifically about Varnedoe.

How much is lost if that taboo is violated? Clearly, fewer officials would be embarrassed. More important, when a reporter involves an official in crafting a story, the implicit pact between the independent reporter and the reader is broken. Quote approval can be seen as a form of insider trading -- elites sharing the inside dope before passing on a diluted version to the general public.

The press's quiet acceptance of quote approval surely owes something to the fact that reporters are an influential elite and are themselves often the subject of interviews. They have had a taste of their own medicine and they don't like it. Their own papers have policies saying that anyone who calls asking them questions is to be passed on to the P.R. department. In these circumstances, it would be hypocritical for them to insist on open accountability from officials.

Quote approval arises from real and urgent factors: it answers journalists' needs to explore people's thoughts on subjects and assuages sources' fears about what happens when they expose their thinking. The sophisticated deal they make may be mutually beneficial -- may at times even serve the public good -- but all the same it's a form of low-level corruption that both parties accept but don't talk about. It would probably take a scandal -- say the admission by a reporter that he had held back an explosive piece of information because his source had not approved its release -- to make publications take a stand against the practice.

For my own part, while I'm sure I will find myself yielding control over quotes again, I find the arrangement obnoxious. I went into journalism to give more open expression to ideas and personalities, not rein them it. These days I'm experimenting with other solutions to the underlying trust problem -- being candid at the start about my point of view, for instance, and about what I'm hoping to get from the source. Quote approval seems too big a concession to arid institutionalism.

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