On September 25, the White House released what it called a “full, unredacted transcript” of US president Donald Trump’s phone call with president Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. In the fine print, though, it specifies that it’s “not a verbatim transcript of a discussion.” News outlets struggled to figure out what to call it, with the New York Times calling it a “reconstructed transcript” and the Washington Post saying “rough transcript.” Before long, #NotATranscript was trending on Twitter, as people recognized something fundamentally misleading in calling a document a “transcript” if it was not a verbatim record of what was said. But what’s behind this, and why does it matter?
https://qz.com/1717869/why-its-wrong-to-call-the-white-house-ukraine-memo-a-transcript/