Quote Mine

"This wiki is [...] 'stereotyped and trite.' In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are [...] about [...] showing off how snide and sarcastic we can be."

—The TV Tropes Wiki Home Page

Suppose Bob, a famous critic, said that Tropers: The Movie "had the potential to be a great work of art in different hands, but the lead actor is a coke fiend and the director was Uwe Boll," but the commercial would only quote Bob: "...a great work of art."

The commercial has just quote mined. It's a dirty, rotten, low-down trick, one of The Oldest Ones in the Book, and is a subtrope of Blatant Lies. Features commonly in sloppy rhetoric and propaganda pieces. Unfortunately, this usually works with an ill-informed audience, as the speaker can usually expect that they will not check the source for the quotes. Frequently used as part of an ad hominem fallacious argument.

When this technique is practiced on audio to make a deceptive soundbite, (as in confessional interviews on reality shows, or comments that are then used as voiceovers), it's called a "Frankenbite".

Compare/Contrast Quote Swear Unquote (fiddling with quotes, but not passing them off as accurate). Also compare Manipulative Editing. Very likely to lead to Beam Me Up, Scotty. Despite the similarity in sound, has nothing to do with Enemy Mine.

Examples of Quote Mine include:

Advertising

  • Advertisers commonly do this to hype critical acclaim for pretty much any product they want to sell.
    • Dennis Miller once noted that if he said, "Whoever made this movie should be put in a gas chamber", the ads would read, "... a gas! - Dennis Miller".
    • Roger Ebert, in his scathing review of The Last Boy Scout said: "Perhaps propelled by the determination of its star, Bruce Willis, to erase the box-office curse of Hudson Hawk, this film panders with such determination to the base instincts of the action crowd that it will, I am sure, be an enormous hit." Guess which three words the posters loudly declared Ebert saying? (Although he did it give a three-star "Good" rating.)
      • He also got quote mined for his review of G-Force where he called the film "non-stop, wall-to wall madcap action." G-Force proudly presented this on their posters, ignoring that he was criticizing that aspect of the movie, not praising it, and that he actually gave the film 2 1/2 stars (mediocre).
      • On the other hand, he is well aware of this trope, as anybody who works in newspapers is, and actually called out advertisers preemptively who might do this for his review of Dumb and Dumber (where he wrote that he laughed himself silly at the parakeet scene, but didn't enjoy the rest of the movie.)
    • Another one, slightly more subtle: Anatomy of Hell says on its poster that it was deemed "provocative" for its graphic sexual sequences, but leaves out any indication of whether the reviewer thought the provocation was a good thing.
    • Discussed in this article.
    • It can be safely assumed that if a review blurb contains ellipses, what is being left out is less than complimentary. For instance, if a blurb says "This film is... an amazing achievement", you can bet that the full statement is something along the lines of "This film is so mind-numbingly stupid that getting anybody to go see it would be an amazing achievement."
    • On the back of the box for Rock of the Dead is a quote from IGN: "Why didn't anyone think of this before?". The 5.0 out of 10 score (translation: 0 out of 4) that IGN gave the game is omitted.
    • The Sands Of Oblivion DVD has the quote "'One of the most unique story ideas for any movie the Sci-Fi Channel ever produced' - Dread Central" The respective review gives it two "knives" out of five and laments on how wasted said unique idea was.
  • Comedian Michael McIntyre admitted on Have I Got News for You that he used to advertise his act as having received four stars, neglecting to clarify that that was the sum total of stars from all his reviews.
  • Infamously bad shooter Daikatana featured a quote from PC Zone on an ad, reading "Absolutely brilliant"—these two words were taken from a preview which appeared years before the actual game (PC Zone actually gave the game 53% and a very negative review.)
  • This happened to one EGM previewer when he wrote a preview blurb about Bubsy 3D, embarrassing him for many years.
  • The song "Strut" sung by Sheena Easton is about how terrible it is for men to look at women as sex objects. ("Strut, pout, Put it out/That's what you want from women"). When the song was used in an advertisement for a health club in the United States, every second line was deleted, resulting in the song having the exact opposite meaning. ("Strut, pout, Put it out/(silence)").
  • Advertisements for Collateral quote a review as saying the film is "a knockout." The actual review says the film declines in quality toward the end, but says "the first two thirds is a knockout."


Anime and Manga


Comic Books

  • The Golden Age MAD feature "Movie... Ads!" showed how movie advertisers can cut and paste 1/16-star reviews into more positive-sounding quotes:

(Newspaper critic:) "NEW LOW IN MOVING PICTURES: A colossal time waster was Warndher Bros' latest release The Spectacle. What stupendous nerve they had in showing such a picture. It was wonderful to get out of the theater. I was dying looking at this dog and it felt so good to leave when it finally ended..."
(Same critic as quoted in ad:) "New... a colossal time... stupendous... wonderful... felt so good..."

  • A Hsu and Chan comic explained that the title characters do this when their games are rated poorly. "Even the bad reviews are wordy enough that we can at least cut-and-paste together a decent blurb."

Quote on the game box: "Not... That... Bad!"

  • An issue of Simpsons Comics has Bart sneak into Lisa's room to steal and/or destroy various items. He comes upon her diary, reading "This morning, Mom whipped some eggs. Dad slept late. We mocked Bart for leaving the dog in the basement all night." Using white-out and some alterations with his pen, Bart changes this to "This morning, Mom whipped Dad. Later, we locked Bart in the basement all night." He then submits the altered diary to a literary magazine competition in order to humiliate his sister - but the work is hailed as a masterpiece, and Lisa is offered a book deal!


Film

  • The second live-action Scooby Doo movie makes use of this. A news reporter secretly the main villain takes Fred's comments and remarks out of context to defame the gang.
  • A partly non-spoken example comes from The Remake of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town—when Deeds rescues a woman from a burning building, a reporter edits the footage to make it look like he raped her, threw her cats out a window, and laughed at the prospect of being brought to justice.
  • In Used Cars the competition makes an obvious edit in the protagonist's ad saying they had "...style of cars" to "a mile of cars" and used it in court, suing for false advertising; the protagonists then had to scramble to assemble 5,280 feet of cars on the lot.
  • The creationist documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed features interviews from a number of scientists and critics of intelligent design, who later publicly accused the film of quote-mining them. Michael Shermer claims that he accused interviewer Ben Stein of fishing for certain responses during the interview itself.
    • Bill Maher was caught out in a similar manner after his interview with scientist Francis Collins for his film Religulous was heavily edited to misconstrue Dr Collins arguments.
    • Dawkins made a parody video in response to Expelled where he did this to his own clips, as well as cutting Stein so that he is arguing that there is unfair bias against the "stork theory" of childbirth.
  • Used in Spice World to discredit the girls. During an interview, one of them answers a question with "is the Pope Catholic?", as in, "yes, of course." A tabloid quotes the response, conveniently leaving out the context that it was a rhetorical question. Since "Is the Pope Catholic?" is a very common rhetorical question, it's hard to imagine many people falling for that trick in Real Life.
  • Bowling for Columbine was accused of this with Charlton Heston; observant viewers noticed that his clothes changed during a single speech.
    • They also cut his post-Columbine speech at the line "we're already here," making his point (that NRA members were part of the emergency personnel of the tragedy) sound more like a smarmy mockery of his anti-gun opponents.
  • USA Today's review of the Eragon movie described it as "a pleasant enough fantastical adventure, but it does feel naggingly derivative." A commercial for the movie cropped the testimonial, rendering it "A FANTASTICAL ADVENTURE!"
  • In Iron Man 2, during the Senate subcommittee hearing, the senator in charge deliberately has Colonel Rhodes quote a section of his report on the Iron Man armor out of context, and Rhodes outright calls him on this bit of dishonesty.
  • In You've Got Mail, Joe Fox represents a chain of bookstores, whose newest location is right next to the small indie shop owned by Kathleen Kelly. Both are interviewed by the local TV news, but Fox's interview is edited down to the seemingly-standoffish line "I sell cheap books. Sue me." Fox, watching the broadcast, is not amused, and reads off a long list of all the positive things he said about his store. In that same TV news segment, Kelly repeats a sarcastic quip made by Fox in a previous discussion, but she strips out the sarcasm. Her stilted delivery suggests she's uncomfortable doing this, so it's easy for the audience to forgive her.
  • Die Hard 4, the villains' terror-inducing public message is entirely built out of quotes from presidents ranging from Nixon to George W. Bush. One of the hackers responsible for the message quips that he should've used more Nixon.


Literature

  • Scott Adams pointed this out in a Dilbert book, where he had an example of a press release complaining about the media, and how it would be reported by the media:

Our company is skilled in many other things that are never reported by the biased media.

    • Luckily, it works both ways:

Original Literal Quote: The lack of quality and complete disregard for the market are evident in this product.
Edited for Readability: The quality are evident in regard of dis product.

  • In The Dresden Files novel Changes, Harry uses this to pull a fast one on the Erlking when he accidentally intrudes in his halls. Being one of The Fair Folk, however, the Erlking is less annoyed and more amused at Harry being so quick-witted.
  • In a letter to Private Eye remonstrating with their caustic review of The Steep Approach To Garbadale, Iain Banks predicted that his publisher will take Bookworm's phrase "Quite entertaining, but full of undifferentiated dialogue, and looking as though it was cobbled together in about three weeks", remove 2/3 of it, and slap "Quite entertaining - Private Eye" on the paperback cover. They didn't.
  • The Bible: "So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. ... Go and do likewise." This quote, which starts with Matthew 27:5 and skips over the entire book of Mark (among other verses) to end with part of Luke 10:37, is often used as an exaggerated example of what can result when Biblical verses are taken out of context.
  • Artemis Fowl does this in the second book. He mines a recorded conversation with his mother for quotes that he then combines into an entirely different message to fool his school principal.
  • Brother Eagle, Sister Sky by Susan Jeffers had hippy-friendly quotes extracted from the Chief Seattle's Speech (which may be apocryphal in the first place), of all things. Which was noted in A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin - their response was "make a 'beautiful environmental statement' out of that, if you can" and quoting the part which ends with "for the dead are not altogether powerless".

Live Action TV

  • The Daily Show does this quite frequently, usually in the form of interrupting a speaker to make a joke and then not revisiting the clip. The Daily Show has lampshaded this and will often play the second part of a clip that directly contradicts the first part. At least, it will now.
    • Stephen Colbert is often accused of doing similar things in his interviews. He once lampshaded this by inviting a reporter to interview him and making easily editable statements like "There are people who say THE TROOPS ARE STUPID!... I am not one of those people." "President Obama is VERY SCARY TO WHITE house PEOPLE... who are hoping for a Republican victory."
  • In Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Harriet talks about how the Bible says homosexuality is a sin. She goes on to point out that the Bible also says that we are not to judge. Guess which part of the quote gets printed.
    • Kind of an example itself; the Bible says everyone is a sinner.
  • An episode of Babylon 5 featured a news report which did this, along with a whole bunch of other ghastly "journalistic" tricks, to cast the titular station in a very bad light (this happened after the newly authoritarian Earth government took over the news channel in question and turned it into an overt propaganda outlet).
    • Although given that the B5 staff knew this was probably going to happen, you'd think they would have refrained from giving the reporters ammunition like "no force in the universe can stop us" to work with.
    • Sometimes they give them nothing and it's still abused. In another clip, Londo is complaining to Sheridan about the climate control in his quarters while Sheridan smiles and nods. Londo concludes with "This is highly inappropriate, Captain." The news report narrates over everything but the last sentence with a bit about how Sheridan is now taking orders from aliens. And cuts off just before Sheridan's highly insulting (to Londo) rebuff.
  • Brass Eye has Nicholas Parsons reading a poem purportedly by anthropologist Desmond Morris about the plight of an elephant in an East German zoo (note that it was filmed in 1997, long after Germany had reunified) that's got its trunk stuck up its backside. The footage is strategically and very obviously edited - watch here (the relevant bit starts at 3:17):

NP: Aren't we a bunch of fuckwits? An elephant could no more get its trunk up its arse than we could lick our balls.

  • The Late Show With David Letterman had a segment called "Late Show Unfair Edit" in which they would splice together words from a politician's speech or interview to make it appear that they said something stupid.
  • Happens to Bette in The L Word. When ambushed by Faye Buckley about a controversial exhibit at her museum, Bette defends it, but her words are later mined to make it sound like an admission that she and the exhibit are perverted.
  • Happens to GOB in Arrested Development when he is accused of killing an old man who went missing. He tells the media, "Don't edit this statement to make it sound like I killed him!" Needless to say, those last three words were all the reporters needed.
  • That '70s Show,
    • In the episode "Eric's Birthday", when Laurie is asking Eric to borrow his car, and Kelso hears it as she was coming onto him. The thing is, Kelso's "interpretation" is practically a YouTube Poop, it's so mangled.

Eric: Aren't you a little cold?
Laurie: No, in fact I'm hot. Besides, it's not like I'm completely naked under this.
(later)
Eric: Okay, but I need a favor.
Laurie: For you? I don't think so.
Eric: I'll let you borrow the Vista Cruiser.
Laurie: All night.
Eric: All night?! ... Fine. Just tell Mom that I'm too old for surprise parties.
Laurie: But you're the baby, and Mommy loves her baby.
(Kelso hears:)
Laurie: I'm hot for you, Kelso. I'm completely naked under this. I want you, all night. And Mommy loves her baby.

    • In the episode "Jackie Bags Hyde", when Jackie wants a date with Hyde:

Hyde: I told you again and again, that I have no interest in you, and you don't have a chance! And yet, you keep thinking that I have interest in you, and you have a chance!
Jackie: Wait. Did you just say that you're interested in me and I have a chance?

  • Radio Active: In one episode, Roger is extolling the virtues of Mr Noseworthy over the radio. "Technical difficulties" (in the form of deliberate vandalism) renders his statement that, "In his field, competence knows no equal!" as "In...competence knows no equal."
  • Parodied in a segment on America's Funniest Home Videos. It showed clips of stage performances while Bergeron "read" reviews of them and the Quote Mined version appeared on screen. The final review was so bad it was reduced to "The Happy Musical is... A show!"
  • The pilot of Even Stevens had Louis being an unwitting victim of this
  • Done cleverly in Jonathan Creek, where a villain gets another villain to read out what's supposedly an account of an old legend, but is set up so when he tapes it and removes sections, it edits together to sound like a phone message—allowing the first villain to fake the second villain supposedly phoning someone after he has been murdered.
  • An episode of That's So Raven has Raven and Chelsea on a game show, where the producer pits the friends against each other by pulling this trick and editing the videos they had made about each other. For example, Raven said about Chelsea: "Chelsea is such a good friend, I would never want to lose her. And that's coming from the heart." It was edited down to "Chelsea is such a lose...er. And that's coming from the heart."
  • Story and sound editors for reality shows do this so regularly that they've named the result. They call it a "Frankenbite"; a soundbite stitched together like a Frankenstein's monster of mismatched parts.
  • Demonstrated on Frontline. An expert is asked about the possibility of someone surviving for weeks in the desert. He says "No way, it's imposssible", before going on to explain why the woman in question could be an exception. The reporters edit this out.
  • In the early Columbo installment "Ransom for a Dead Man", a woman murders her husband and disguises it as a kidnapping. To create the impression of her husband being alive and in the custody of the imaginary kidnappers, she plays a cleverly edited recording of him over the phone.
  • In News Radio episode "The Real Deal", Bill McNeal attempts to score an interview with Jerry Seinfeld, who is dining by himself at a restaurant, only to fail spectacularly by pestering him. He resorts to taking the tape recording of their hostile exchange out of context, deliberately misrepresenting Jerry as an egotist.


Music

  • Tim Minchin does this to himself in the song "Context". At first it is a song about how he hates various demographic groups, but when sung in full it is about how he hates people who do bad things, regardless of race:

I don't like Jews who make and distribute kiddy porn
Neither should you, they're ethically and spiritually poor, that's a fact
I don't like black people who risk billions of other people's money gambling on future derivatives
It's just not acceptable, there should be some kind of law, that is that.


Newspaper Columns

  • In a Dave Barry column he describes a novel called "Romeo and Juliet 2", citing glowing reviews from a couple of completely insignificant newspapers, followed by a glowing review from the New York Times:

"...a recently published book!"


Newspaper Comics

  • In a Dirkjan comic, Bert writes a novel. One reviewer describes it as "pure nonsense, which should never have been published". Later prints of the novel cite the review as "pure".
  • One FoxTrot strip had Jason recording Paige talking on the phone: "I need to cut three articles out of the newspaper for Mr. Vivona's class every day this week, and the only pair of scissors I have is totally dull." He then gets on the computer and edits it so she's saying "I cut class every day this week. Mr. Vivona is totally dull."


Video Games

  • In Beyond Good and Evil, the government's propaganda machine removes the "not exactly" from Pey'j's "Yeah, well, you guys are not exactly what I'd call as fast as a speedin' bullet" for a radio broadcast.
  • Kane and Lynch did this with their ads, getting quotes from previews and present it as review quotes.
  • Fate Stay Night has one infamous example, though the "mine" part comes from the audience rather than in-universe.

Shirou: "People die if they are killed. That's the way things should be."

    • Even if you know about that last part to some people it just sounds like he is questioning the previous statement. Still taken out of context though.
  • Assassin's Creed Brotherhood's story begins "at the end," Sequence 9, Ezio Auditore tells his nemesis Cesare Borgia that "Mario Auditore led me to you!" However, when the story is rewound to almost eight years before at the Siege of Monteriggioni, Mario Auditore is killed and Cesare seizes the Apple of Eden -- which Ezio later takes back and uses to track Cesare down. When Sequence 9 is reached in "proper order," the same scene occurs but with Ezio saying "The Apple you stole from Mario Auditore led me to you!"
  • This article argues that many of the infamous comments from Activision CEO Bobby Kotick are taken out of context, such as by presenting jokes as completely literal or misinterpreting financial terms as emotive language.


Webcomics

  • Dominic Deegan features a Trickster elementalist who literally rearranges quotes from characters by catching "words on the wind" in a bottle in order to have them say something completely different from what they'd meant.
  • This Cectic provides an excellent example.
  • Schlock Mercenary had a moment when Ennesby educated Tagon about such possibilities. Then this happens with Schlock. Earlier, UNS tried to frame Breya for Xinchub's treason.
  • Owlturd Comix shows how it's done.

Well, I notice that you could use some of the letters in this comic to spell "Hitler was right". So I assume that's your main point.

Web Original

  • Yahtzee occasionally spoofs this by mine-quoting himself - giving a long list of reasons he dislikes something and ending it with a quasi-positive statement, while displaying only the last few words on the screen, as if it were an endorsement. For example, while he says, "...if you've got a love of repetitive tactical combat that borders on the fetishistic, and you really badly need to know what happens next to faceless characterless protagonist of the ongoing storyline then I heartily recommend Perseus Mandate" shows only the last five words on the screen.
  • Stephen Colbert invited fans to do this in the Edit Challenge. Footage of an interview was posted on the internet, deliberately providing material that could be edited into something less innocent. For example, "I love cock-fighting." The results can be found on YouTube.
    • The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are also frequently accused of using the technique themselves - Bill O'Reilly complained that one clip of him apparently contradicting himself had "eight out-of-context edits" within a few seconds. Whether the edits actually changed the meaning of what he was saying is debatable.
  • A staple of YouTube Poop is to take innocuous sources, such as a video game cutscene or children's cartoon, and remix the dialogue judiciously for the lulz. Often called "sentence mixing" by the fandom.

"...and I hate to keep beating - my grandmother - here... *punch punch punch*"

  • Byron Hall and someone identifying himself only as "Burnout" counter-reviewed Jason Sartin and Darren MacLennan's infamous review of FATAL; it was rather hilarious and sad. Sad because it would appear that Hall and Burnout's myriad counts of quote mining appear to have been from genuinely understanding the remarks being mined the way they ended up mining them. They also appear to think that reviewing while still being entertaining is somehow unprofessional, so we have the rather hilarious image of a guy who created a game with rules about rape trying to take the moral high ground over a couple guys who listed hitting yourself in the scrotum with a tack hammer as an activity preferable to playing FATAL.
    • Of course, the net result is that someone who bothered to make a over-the-over-the-top gross parody "game", the only imaginable purpose of which is blatant trolling of Yaoi Fangirls (who else would try to play anything with all those rules?) not only blatantly trolled a couple of "offended!" reviewers whose attention constantly wanders toward male genitals - which is just continuing to shoot fish in the barrel - but trolled their followers into claiming that they consider coprolalia entertaining all over internetz, which is at least some result.
  • Obama Admits He Is A Muslim. The whole thing.
  • Dirty Potter. NSFW
  • Parodied in this Lasagna Cat video, in relation to the Garfield Live Action Adaptations. After a straight quote from Roger Ebert's positive reviews of both movies, the video begins quote mining from other, more negative reviews. The quotes start out saying nice things about the movies, then become vague, then scathing, then outright ridiculous.
  • Troper Ronka 87 did a liveblog of Dingo Pictures' Mockbuster Anastasia. Her hyperbolic, vitriolic summation of the movie was then put on the company's quotes page, where troper Willy Four Eyes quote mined it to hilarious effect here.
  • This Harry Potter Fan Art.


Western Animation

"Would I say, 'If you're hunting for a good read this October, Marge Simpson's book is a Clear and Present Danger to your free time'? Hell no I wouldn't. What do you mean I just said it? That doesn't count! Hello. Hello?"

What Homer actually said: Well, somebody had to take the babysitter home, then I noticed she was sitting on the Gummi Venus, so I grabbed it off her. Ohhhh... just thinking about that sweet, sweet candy, ahhh... I just wish I had another one right now!
What they broadcast: Well, somebody had to take the babysitter home, then I noticed she was sitting on- her- sweeet can- so I grabbed- her- sweeet can- ohhhh, just thinking about- her- can- I just wish I had - her- sweet, sweet- s-s-s-sweet can-...

    • Then at the end, when the show has to broadcast a correction, they show it so fast it was almost a Blipvert.
    • "Critics say this book is 'definitely' dot-dot-dot 'useful!'" -Marge Simpson, on a self help book.
  • In one episode of House of Mouse, Mortimer suggests that the winner of a volleyball game will be the one to ask Minnie out. Mickey makes the mistake of replying "So, what, we should treat Minnie like she's some sort of trophy?!" Mortimer then relays this sentence back to Minnie later, while of course leaving out that it was rhetorical. Mickey is so flustered by Mortimer revealing this that he can only stammer in response. (On the other hand, Mortimer DID manage to tempt Mickey into the volleyball game, but it was still Mortimer's idea in the first place.)
  • Vicky does this to Timmy in Fairly Oddparents. "What? I never cheated on my math test!" becomes "I cheated on my math test!" and she blackmails him with the threat of playing the recording for his parents.
    • Then Timmy turns the tables on Vicki in the same episode using the same tactic.
  • In one Wunschpunsch episode the spell of the week made everyone hate everyone. The only way to break it was to make someone say "I love you". To achieve that, the two main characters found the love interest of one of them. The Raven asked her "What do you think of me?" while the Cat hid somewhere with a tape recorder. She answered with a rain of insults, Cat quickly paused and unpaused the recording so that it, when played back, finally said the needed words.
  • In an ad for The Amazing World of Gumball, the title character splices together footage of his friends and peers to make it seem as if they are praising him:

"Gumball... is the most... amazing... DUDE!... I don't have time... to say all the good things... abooooout... this... amazing... DUDE!"

  • In Dan Vs. "Elise's Parents", Dan uses a hidden tape recorder to record a conversation with Elise's father, Don, about his cupcake business. He then edits it to make it sound like Don's in the mafia so that the police will get involved, freeing up Chris for the renaissance fair.
  • Blatantly parodied in My Gym Partner's a Monkey when Jake joins the school newspaper group. He then proceeds to persuade Adam to say some very embarassing things (" What? No, I'm not in love with her! I'm pretty sure she's crazy!"). Adam finds out about this and simply stops talking to Jake. Not one to be deterred, Jake simply starts making things up., and the student body believe him. So, to get revenge and hopefully stop this stupidity, Adam joins the school newspaper and starts making up incredibly embarrassing stories about Jake...which actually turn out to be true. The entire student body then start asking why he'd do such a mean thing to his friend Jake.
  • In the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode "The Mysterious Mare Do Well", Spike does this when he's writing Rainbow Dash's "autobiography":

Applejack: And she's modest and humble. She lets her actions speak for themselves. Gotta admire that.
Rainbow Dash: I don't have to admire that! I don't think she's all that great!
Spike: She's... great.
Rainbow Dash: I didn't say that.

  • Adventure Time: One episode has Finn and Jake discovering pre-recorded tapes left by their father. By the end of the episode, they found all the tapes, and Jake starts doing some Manipulative Editing.

"Boys, I made you something--it's babies. Full of babies. --the family sword. It's made out of--babies."

Real Life

  • The Shirley Sherrod fiasco. In short, Ms. Sherrod, a black employee of the USDA, gave a speech about how she nearly let her feelings about race cause her to give less help to a white farmer over 20 years ago. However, working with him taught her that such an attitude was wrong and she helped him save his farm. Andrew Breitbart played only the first couple of minutes where she admitted racism. Before she could get the rest of the story out, she was denounced by the NAACP and fired by the USDA. After it was found out Breitbart had done this, Bill O Reilly, who was quite scathing toward Ms. Sherrod, offered her a sincere apology, and Glenn Beck said she should have been offered her job back. Sherrod later announced that she is suing Breitbart for slander.
    • This is one that the media should've known better, as Breitbart used James O'Keefe to pull a similar slander job on an ACORN worker to make it seem that the group would be giddily happy to break the law.
      • Around eight months after the Sherrod fiasco, O'Keefe again took part in a massive quote-mining exercise to make allegations against NPR. You'd expect by now that government organisations would learn to just ignore O'Keefe and Breitbart by now.
      • Ratings, dear boy.
    • For the record, Breitbart claims he did not edit the original video. He merely posted it as he received it (in its pre-edited form) and did not gain access to the full version until much later. And when he did, he posted the full version.
      • Which does little to change the fact that Breitbart's track record puts him in the wrong much more often than not.
  • Happens all the time in political campaigning. A truly Egregious example from a Florida campaign: Daniel Webster (no, not that one), a devout Christian, was lecturing on how not to take the wrong lessons from the Bible: "Don’t pick the ones that say, 'She should submit to me.' That's in the Bible, but pick the ones that you're supposed to do. So instead, 'Love your wife, even as Christ loved the church he gave himself for it' as opposed to, 'Wives, submit yourself to your own husband.'" His opponent edited it down to: "She should submit to me. That's in the Bible."
    • Anderson Cooper called Webster's opponent, Alan Grayson, out on it. Even though Grayson's a Democrat and Anderson's arguably a member of the so-called "liberal media".
  • Here's a speech that explains it
  • Afghan parliamentary representative Malalai Joya was removed from her office using this trick, after a television interview was cut to make it seem she had insulted the entire political body, when in reality she had simply ridiculed warlords among the officials. To top it off, the whole 'insulting the government being against the law' thing wasn't even a law yet. She still wasn't invited back.
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer is often quoted saying "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," quoting the Bhagivad Ghita, as if to indicate that he felt the Manhattan Project was a mistake. In context, he makes it clear that the quote was in reference to doing your duty, even if it was unpleasant.
  • Steven Harper's attack adds aimed at Micheal Ignatiaff include the quote "No one speaks for the Liberal Party of Canada, but me." which was clearly taken out of context from when he was trying to establish his credibility as the leader of the party, though it is presented with the intent of making Ignatiaff seem like a control freak. The pot calling the kettle black?
  • A more meta example: there was a certain period of Imperial China - namely that of Spring and Autumn and that of Warring States - when diplomatic language relies on quote mining from a certain collection of poems.
  • Attempted (failed) positive example: on the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial, a quote was mashed up into "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness." The problem: it was a rhetorical device from a sermon against self-aggrandizement.
  • A particularly egregious case occurred when Mitt Romney used a clip of Barack Obama saying "If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose." to imply that Obama thought his economic record was weak. The problem? Obama was himself quoting John McCain's campaign!
  • On the day of a massive public sector strike, Jeremy Clarkson was booked on BBC's The One Show in which he made comments that he would execute strikers... as part of a joke about the BBC's obsession with balance; Clarkson himself was pretty neutral on the strikes. Of course, everyone latched onto the joke acting as if, for once, he was being serious.
    • Apart from Number 10, which issued a statement saying: "Those who have made the regrettable decision to strike may be assured: Executions are not government policy."
  • A tactic used as often as not by anti-religious critics, skeptics and atheist fundamentalists is to Quote Mine the Scriptures of various religions - the most popular targets being the Bible and the Qu'ran, often combining a Quote Mine with The War on Straw and/or Guilt by Association. One of many examples is done with Luke 19:27 "But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them-bring them here and kill them in front of me." The Quote Mine is the claim that the verse a call to arms for Christians to kill non-believers who reject the message of the Gospel. Except it's not. The verse is part of a statement made by a character in one of Jesus' parables.
    • Luke 19:27 is a verse is from the Parable of the Ten Minas, where Jesus explains what the coming of the Kingdom of God is like and the importance of making the most of what God gives you, with the verse in question representing God's future and final judgement for humanity, as the part about killing is allegorical of the eternal damnation of those who reject God. Despite this, numerous anti-religious people and outlets have based arguments around this specific Quote Mine, the most high profile example coming from Sam Harris, one of the founders of the New Atheism movement; Sam Harris later acknowledged and withdrew the inaccurate argument, but not without Christian apologists calling him and the argument out.
  • A common tactic by creationists is to quote mine On the Origin of Species, specifically, the part where Charles Darwin talks about how absurd it seems that the eye could have evolved. The quote mine is leaving out the second paragraph, wherein he explains exactly why eye evolution is perfectly reasonable.
    • The Quote Mine, "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree."
      • The immediately following context, "Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound."
    • In fact, quote mining scientists is such a popular tactic of creationists that many prominent biologists deliberately word their lectures and publications in ways to make quote mining more difficult. Also, given that the people who initially carry out the quote mining know what they're saying is a deliberate misrepresentation it's given rise to the Liars for Jesus meme.
  • Opponents of abortion and birth control sometimes combine a Quote Mine with a Hitler Ate Sugar, attempting to "prove" that Planned Parenthood is racist because Margaret Sanger once said "We do not want word to get out that we are trying to exterminate the Negro population." The reason she didn't want that word to get out is that, well, that wasn't what she was trying to do in the first place. The quote was from a conversation with a popular minister in a black community and was about finding ways to extend her services to black women who needed them without being suspected of specifically targeting a group of people for elimination. The quote is used to accuse her of exactly what she was trying to avoid being accused of.
  • Many know of Michael Eisner's infamous quote Our business has no obligation to make art or history or to make a statement with the content we create, but not many are aware of what he said immediately after:

But, to make money, and to see a return from the content we do create, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement.
 In order to make money, we must always make compelling and relevant content, and if we make compelling and relevant content targeted to a specific audience and deliver that consistently over time, at times we will reliably make history, art, a statement or all three.

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