In my magazine-writing days I did hundreds of interviews, and while most of them were not primarily used to produce quotations, I did have to consider how to handle the actual words when quotations were called for. For business stories in which the point was the data–how exactly did an engineer or marketing manager describe a product or function–I had no problem with editing in the direction of standard English. But in cases where the interviewee’s voice mattered, I might not go too far beyond cutting the ums and ers and minor backtracks and the NYT’s “false starts.”
Interviews conducted as interviews (as distinct from information-gathering sessions) got that treatment precisely because part of what was being offered was personality and voice, and the only means to signal that was through actual language. If I were transcribing the Martosko example, the the ums would go but most of the “likes” would stay. Though, to be fair and accurate, the kid does lapse into near-incoherence in the middle (“she just like presents themselves to be like, so like negative towards like minorities and stuff like that”) before figuring out what point is being headed for (Trump’s mockery is “really freaking dumb”).
Thought experiment: How might one edit an interview with Trump? Seems to me that understanding his personality and even his truthfulness might require an unvarnished representation of his actual speech patterns. (Myself, I’m pretty sure I can tell exactly when he strays from a prepared statement just from the audio. The guy’s verbal tells are pretty obvious.)
I’m not arguing against the proposition that the decision to present this kid’s opinion in its entirety amounts to editorializing, but, hey, it’s the Daily Mail, so it’s not like Martosko is a documentarian.
