Journalists in the US agonise about the smallest details, but here we prefer to use the broad brush, telling ourselves that's how the readers like it. Soon we will have to change

A few weeks ago the Washington Post carried a story about an American footballer called Clinton Portis, whose career has been blighted by injuries. It quoted him as saying: "I don't know how anybody feels. I don't know how anybody's thinking. I don't know what anyone else is going through. The only thing I know is what's going on in Clinton Portis's life."

Elsewhere in the same edition of the paper a sports columnist also looked at Portis's prospects, and he used the same quotation - or at least, almost the same quotation. His version had Portis saying: "I don't know how nobody feel, I don't know what nobody think, I don't know what nobody doing, the only thing I know is what's going on in Clinton Portis's life."

When readers wrote in to ask how a man could speak in grammatical, standard English in one version when in the other he did not, the paper investigated and came back with the obvious explanation: the reporter had tidied up Portis's English for the printed page, while the columnist published it verbatim.

Who was right? The Post's policy is clear: "When we put a source's words inside quotation marks, those exact words should have been uttered in precisely that form." But the reporter, Howard Bryant, had another view. "For me, having covered athletes for 15 years, I've always felt conscious and uncomfortable about the differences in class, background and race - I'm an African American - and in terms of the people who are doing the speaking and the people who are doing the writing. I really don't like to make people look stupid, especially when I understand what they're saying."

It is a dilemma. Quotation marks, if they have any point and if readers are to trust them, must surely indicate that the words they enclose were the words that were actually spoken. On the other hand, there is a risk of holding up to ridicule people with educational disadvantages that are no fault of their own.

I repeat this story, which was reported in some detail by the Washington Post ombudsman, because it shows just how wide the Atlantic can be, culturally. Ask British journalists which is right, the Post or Bryant, and the most common response will be a snort of derision.

Over here we tidy up quotations without a second thought, and not for Bryant's delicate reasons. For years the words of John Prescott were routinely doctored so that it appeared he spoke like most other politicians; it was only after the public became familiar with his special style of speech, through television, that journalists began to reproduce his remarks as spoken. And then only sometimes.

Prescott's quotes had been improved, not to make him look better, but to make life easier for the readers, who would otherwise have found them baffling. And I guess most British journalists would say that was their general approach: stick as closely as you can to the words and don't depart from the intended meaning, but make sure the quotation is in a form that the readers can digest easily.

That is typical of our rough-and-ready ethics here. At best, if we think about it, we rely on trust, and if that makes you uneasy in the present media climate it probably should. Even if no one is deliberately making things up, how can you know that a newspaper reporter, who may be tidying up a quotation already doctored once by a news agency, is faithfully reflecting what was said or meant?

In the US the big papers have long been fussier, and in recent years they have grown more so because of scrutiny from bloggers, pressure groups and others who can easily check, compare and complain online. This is coming our way. Not only are our own citizen critics and fact-checkers gaining in confidence, but those great armies of US critics are also weighing in here - ask any editor, or better still ask any Middle East correspondent, because their email inboxes are permanently full.

In time, the new pressures will force all of us in this country, journalists and readers alike, to take clearer positions on the fine points of journalistic ethics. And it will be no bad thing.

You pays your money

Charles and Camilla had their "worst row since they married" over the Diana event, said the Daily Mail, and the Mirror wrote of "spectacular barneys" between them. But elsewhere in the Mirror we were told: "Is everything OK between these two? The answer is a resounding yes."

The Telegraph (no less) told us on the morning of the service that the duchess would spend the day alone at Balmoral, but the Express reported that she was in Wiltshire with her ex-husband and sister. The Sun said an "angry Camilla will jet off on holiday next week without Charles", but the Mirror declared: "It's nonsense to say she is going off in a huff."

And so on. As ever with royal coverage, they can't all be wrong all of the time.

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University

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