For the better part of five years, I was a journalist. In that time, I wrote over 600 stories and interviewed well over one thousand people. As a journalist, my job was to report the news to the masses in an unbiased, straightforward, manner so that my readers would have the full story – after all, that’s what a journalist does – at least that’s what I thought – because since I became the quoted rather than the quoter, I see the media, and journalism in general, in an entirely different way.

Since I started this job in January, I am on what we call “the other side” of the media. I am no longer writing the stories – I’m in them. Instead of my name being on the by-line, it’s in the body of the story, and instead of making the calls for information, now the reporters come to me.

When a journalist asks a question to their interview subject, it is their job – and responsibility – to make sure that person is quoted correctly in their article. No matter how fast the person who answers is talking, and whether or not the journalist has a tape recorder or just a pad and pen, it does not matter. The person being interviewed must be quoted correctly.

I have been quoted in well over 200 articles since I started at the DOB, and since that very first article, I have seen some outrageous misquotings of things I have said. Now don’t get me wrong, we all make mistakes. I mean, I have been referred to as Paul Weir, Paul Weiss, and even Spokeswoman Paul Wein. That does not bother me. What bothers me is when I give a statement to the media and they “color” it with typical “news” words. For example: about two months ago, the front brick wall of a building in Queens, New York collapsed and killed a 38-year-old woman and her 14-year-old daughter. My job as Press Secretary in a case like that is to acquire the vital information pertaining to the accident from the members of my department and draft a statement for the press. In this particular accident, my statement was: “At approximately 1:00pm on Saturday, July 24, 1999, workmen doing construction on the roof level of a one-story commercial building caused 400 square feet of the facade’s masonry to collapse onto the sidewalk causing the death of two females” The next day, the stories about the accident containing my statement appeared in the paper. To my surprise, a major New York Paper ran an article on the accident and quoted me as saying, “The deadly shower of bricks fell on a 38-year-old woman and her 14-year-old daughter.”

I understand that sensationalism sells, but why would the media deliberately change my quote not because they wanted to alter the content, but because they wanted to add more color?

The answer is because the media enjoys scaring the hell out of us. Think about it. How many times have you seen the word “terror” or “horror” or “agony” on the front page of the paper? How many times have the media used words like “mowed down” to describe a car accident? How many times – during dinner – have you heard, “Is the food you’re eating killing you? We’ll tell you at eleven.”

All I am saying is that people already want to know what is going on in the world. The media does not have to try to get our attention by reporting the news using fear as the main draw.

I can see the headline now. “Terror in Journalism: Paul Wein Blasts Media”