The missing scare quotes

The Toronto Star printed an edited version of my letter today. I expected them to cut it down, but I'm quite unhappy about how it came out:

Antonia Zerbisias took a post from my weblog completely out of context, as evidence that conservative "bloggers" are abandoning their sites now that the Iraq war has turned into a disaster.

In fact, most of the writers I mentioned have temporarily stopped writing for mundane reasons such as work commitments or vacations. Some have already returned. Most of us never left. And despite the continuing problems in Iraq,we remain adamant that removing one of the world's most brutal dictators was the right thing to do. Sometimes, our employment, family or other commitments get in the way, and Zerbisias is just fooling herself if she thinks we've all suddenly become ashamed of our writing.

Take a close look at the first paragraph, and note that they removed the quotation marks I put around "disaster". That was Zerb's word for what's happening in Iraq, not mine. It might not look like much, but I think it completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

I will be asking for a correction. Stay tuned.

Update: as this much-linked post shows, quite a lot has been going very right in post-Saddam Iraq. But of course, none of this matters, because Bush went to war exclusively because of weapons of mass destruction which never existed, except for that sarin shell, which doesn't count.

Update II: I'm not sure how it looked in the print edition, but on the web the letter has been corrected. I could come up with all kinds of theories about why they left out the quotation marks, but for now I'll just assume it was a mistake.

Update III: I just recieved this e-mail message from Don Sellar, the Star's ombudsman:

I was glad to see your letter in today's paper. People under attack or criticism deserve a chance to rebut or reply to columnists.

However, all letters to the editor are subject to editing for space or other reasons. I don't believe the deletion of the quotation marks altered the thrust of your letter, so no published correction is warranted. However, we'll put them back in the online version of your letter in a few minutes.

I bet they'd give Fidel a correction if he asked for it.

Posted by damian at May 19, 2004 06:09 AM