"Journalists doctor quotes and add colorful language to them all the time to spice up stories," H. Bartow Farr III told the Supreme Court on Jan. 14. "They have every right to do it. That’s what the First Amendment is for."

Outside on the courthouse steps, Farr’s client, New Yorker magazine writer Janet Malcolm, added this: "So I fiddled a bit with Jeffrey Masson’s quotes. So what? The man is a conceited fool. My quotes revealed the larger truth. That’s how we do it at The New Yorker. We are artists, not petty scribes.

"And so. what if I pretended to be his friend? That’s journalism. Every journalist … is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Actually, that’s not quite what Farr said. Or what Malcolm said.

Actually, the quoted passages above are my words, not theirs-except the last sentence, which comes verbatim from a 1989 Malcolm article. And as far as I know, Malcolm made no statement on the courthouse steps at all.

I made up the quotes because I wanted to dramatize the wrongheadedness of the Malcolm-New Yorker defense, which is supported by many major news organizations.

But this much is true: If the Court upholds Farr’s arguments, neither he nor Malcolm nor The New Yorker could get to first base suing me for making up phony, offensive quotes and pretending that Farr and Malcolm had uttered them.

That’s because in my opinion-and my opinion would be all that mattered-my phony quotes roughly "convey the same meaning," to borrow Farr’s words, as other things that Farr and Malcolm have said.

The case before the Court, Masson v. The New Yorker, No. 89-1799, is a $10 million libel suit by a brash critic of Freudian psychoanalysis who claims Malcolm savaged him in two 1983 New Yorker articles by attributing to him offensive statements he never made, depicting him as a clownish egomaniac.

The writer hotly denies that she "invented" quotes. But her legal defense is that Masson has no remedy even if she did, because the quotes she allegedly phonied made him look no worse than others she has on tape.

I would not want the Court to hand down a broad ruling for Masson. But any ruling for Malcolm (not likely, by the way) could gravely undermine the notions that journalists are obliged to try for factual accuracy and that most of them take their obligations seriously.

In fact, under the Malcolm defense, concocted quotes like those I started with are not even "false."

This astonishing proposition was blandly advanced in a brief by the Time Inc. Magazine Co. (with which this newspaper’s parent company, American Lawyer Media, L.P., is affiliated), the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Association of Broadcasters, and others:

"A quotation that rationally interprets an ambiguous remark or does not alter the substantive content of an unambiguous remark cannot be ‘false’ for the unremarkable proposition that the author has not changed the meaning of what he or she believed the declarant said."

Here’s my rational interpretation of this contention: If John Doe says to a reporter for Trust Us magazine, "I have had lust in my heart," and if one possible inference is that he often lusts vividly after women not his wife, it would not be "false" for the reporter to "quote" him as follows:

"John Doe confessed today, ‘I have wild sexual fantasies all the time about women other than my wife; I am obsessed by a constant craving for adultery.’ "

One hopes that the journalists at the companies now rushing to Malcolm’s defense have a better appreciation of the difference between truth and falsity than do their lawyers.

Remember, we are talking here about quotations, not paraphrases-and about allegedly deliberate fabrication, not minor deviations from verbatim transcription.

But Farr’s brief suggests reporters have a constitutional privilege to attribute to people words they never spoke in order to make stories "more readable," unless the evidence shows with "convincing clarity" that the reporter subjectively intended to change not only the words but the "meaning," and "in a defamatory way."

"Even if there were differences in meaning" between Malcolm’s quotes and Masson’s words, Farr adds, Malcolm is home free unless the differences were "so obvious" as to prove that she intended such distortions.

(Honest. These quotes are legit. And if Farr complains, are you going to believe me or a guy who writes that "a journalist might legitimately select or alter quotes to produce a readable, coherent, clear story"?)

Among the quotes disputed by Masson are his alleged statements to Malcolm that "I was like an intellectual gigolo" to (or was so perceived by) two more senior psychoanalysts with whom Masson had worked at the Sigmund Freud Archives; that Masson had wanted to make the archives into "a place of sex, women, fun"; and that his book would win him acclaim as, after Freud, "the greatest analyst who ever lived.”

In granting Malcolm summary judgment, two lower federal courts said that even if she deliberately fabricated quotes, she did not act with "actual malice" because the concocted quotes carried much the same meaning as other statements Masson did make.

Malcolm’s more-than-40 hours of taped interviews do contain many vain and boastful statements by Masson. And Masson’s complaint is suspect in light of his initial denials of five quotes that turned out to be on tape.

But there is also evidence suggesting that altering quotes was part of Malcolm’s basic modus operandi. The quotes now in dispute are not on Malcolm’s tapes, despite her earlier statements implying they were. And it’s clear that Malcolm’s editing frequently altered and sometimes distorted quotes that are on the tapes.

Moreover, Malcolm has had to admit that her articles falsely suggested Masson had uttered the "intellectual gigolo" and "sex, women, fun" quotes during a taped interview at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., between bites of goat cheese and striped bass with fennel.

Now Malcolm says she wrote these quotes down during an untaped breakfast interview in New York six months later- which Masson says never took place-and transplanted them. Asked in a deposition to characterize this technique, she said, "We call that writing." I call it lying.

So a plague on both their houses. Now how should the Court resolve this case?

It should let Masson take his claims to trial, but without opening courthouse doors to every libel plaintiff who says he was misquoted.

False cries of misquotation by interviewees who don’t like the way their words look in print are a daily fact of journalistic life. And not all or even most misquotations are either intentional or defamatory.

To avoid a flood of dubious misquotation suits, the Court should hold that a public-figure libel plaintiff can show "actual malice" and get to trial only by producing at least some circumstantial evidence supporting his bare assertion that he was misquoted and suggesting that it was done deliberately. The plaintiff should also have to show the alleged misquotation put him in a worse light than accurate quotations would have. Masson has done this.

Malcolm’s defenders want a broader shield against unwarranted misquotation suits. But their approach would also protect subtly damning changes in an interviewee’s words that can be rationalized as arguably consistent with his meaning.

Any journalist who deliberately makes more than cosmetic changes in verbatim quotes is lying to his readers by telling them these were the interviewee’s words. And journalists’ right to be free from unwarranted libel suits is not the only First Amendment interest at stake here.

As Stewart Baker of D.C. ‘s Steptoe & Johnson writes in a brief supporting Masson, "Reporters who deliberately invent or alter quotations are misrepresenting the views of a man or woman whose right to speak is every bit the equal of theirs.”