“ Our advice to intelligent reporters who wish to be credited with accuracy , when they report quite ordinary men , is this - Avoid accuracy , and cook the speeches." 48 Another phase of " accuracy ” is presented by the habit of
reporters of comparing notes . If the comparison has resulted in error, it is difficult for themember misreported to set himself right
and to disabuse the public of the belief that if all reports agree , they must be correct and the member wrong. “ Any report
appearing in a score or a hundred newspapers, if it has a common origin may and often does lead to mischief. Independent reports correct each other .” 49 This perfected system of parliamentary reporting that “ reached
its zenith of fullness in the sixties and seventies” carried with it
the seeds of dissolution. If an important speech by a great statesman was scheduled for a certain evening, the morning papers were given the choice of a verbatim report, a full report,
or a summary of a column in length ; the verbatim and the full reports were given in the first person , the summary report in the third . But there came a sharp decline in the demand for verba
tims. “ Verbatim reports are as dead as the Dodo," emphatically states one reporter.50
This decline in interest in the verbatim parliamentary report is in part explained by the conditions suggested, - a summary re
port may give a truer idea of the intent of the speaker than do his own words literally set forth . But it is still more explained by the unnecessary duplication of reporting maintained by many news
papers and the obvious advantage of division of labor and reduc tion of expense. Press agencies have for the most part superseded
the verbatim reporters formerly maintained by all the great London and provincial dailies and “ the agencies have captured
48 “ Parliamentary Reporting,” Contemporary Review , June, 1877, 30 : 165 - 167.
19 C . A . Cooper, An Editor 's Retrospect, pp . 80-81. The author has a word of sympathy for the unhappy reporter whose faithful account may be
“ corrected ” by the printer into an impossible version, as was the case when Lord Palmerston , in allusion to Gulliver's Travels, began a speech , “ We have all heard of the battles of the Big -Endians and the Little-Endians.” The printer altered it into the battle of " the big Indians and the little
Indians;” and thus it appeared in theMorning Star. 60 A . Kinnear, “ The Trade in GreatMen 's Speeches,” Contemporary Re view , March , 1899, 75: 439- 444.
