The Man Behind the Ed O’Neill Misquote

So who is this Greg David (pictured), the TV Guide Canada critic who forced his bosses to apologize today for the way he mangled Ed O’Neill‘s recent LA press conference words about Glee star Jane Lynch?

Based on a fall 2009 interview at Toronto’s Ryerson University, he seems like a decent enough guy. He’s actually been with TV Guide since 1991 (!), working his way up through the production and research departments.

David gets himself into a bit of trouble with the interview line, “If you talk [online] with authority, people think you know what you’re talking about.” But overall, he seems like the last guy to intentionally misquote O’Neill as badly as he did (we’ve compared the original cached article to the full text of the press conference).

Did David’s tape recorder malfunction, like that time with Hugh Laurie? Was he under pressure from his editors to manufacture a scoop that wasn’t there? We’re guessing something along the lines of the former.

Also worth noting is the fact that the most offensive-to-O’Neill part of the original December 6th article was not a quote but rather a sub-headline David may not have written. It read: O’Neill says Jane Lynch doesn’t deserve her Emmy.

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