Let this be a lesson to all journalists. Lazily quoting a professional colleague for the purposes of a weekend opinion piece can sometimes cause out-of-context remarks to be framed in an even more distant and confusing context.

Actress Zooey Deschanel (pictured) has taken issue today with a Sunday op ed piece in the LA Times by KPCC radio host Patt Morrison. It’s not so much the conjecture in the first paragraph that the actress might be a “snobby cow.” Rather, it’s that Morrison relied for her Royal Couple-downtown LA musings on remarks given by the actress to USA Today film critic Claudia Puig. Writes Deschanel:

I am completely and utterly shocked that a professional journalist, whom I have never met, would take a partial quote out of context and use it as the basis for a misguided personal attack…

Let me be clear: the quote from USA Today that you used as the foundation of your piece was taken completely out of context. I NEVER said that downtown LA was “the worst of LA”. I did make a reference to a parking lot adjacent to the theater that had a lot of trash in it in an attempt to be humorous. I simply said, “It’s funny they brought royalty here, there is a parking lot with trash around the corner.” It wasn’t an opinion. It was true…

Deschanel mispells “Angeleno” in her piece, but otherwise, she very adeptly and eloquently takes the veteran LA journalist to task. At press time, there was no Twitter response posted yet @Patt_Morrison.

Update – 07/12/11: The response from Morrison comes finally, not via Twitter, but in the form of another less than apologetic July 11 LA Times blog post.