In my view, all writing is a kind of criticism. Anyone who's ever worked with transcripts running into tens of thousands of words knows that it often just makes more sense to condense the repeated instances in which a subject comes up into one clear statementor one confused statement if that was ultimately the subject's state of mind. As an editorial judgment call, that seems no different to me than determining which part of a quote you're going to use verbatim and which you're going to paraphraseand how exactly you're going to paraphrase it. Obviously, in matters that involve legal issues or government policy, it's essential to present the subject's language as rigorously accurately as possibleregardless of how repetitive, unfocused or irrelevant it may be. In other contexts, the writer's own discretion can play more of a role.
Conversations have an emotional character that raw transcripts never capture.
Invariably, people who are shown transcripts of their own speech are stunned at how inarticulate they seem, even if, as a listener, you would judge those people verbally adept. Reading someone's wordsor even your own wordscan be excruciating. It is a vastly different experience from hearing someone speak, and bridging that yawning gap is a critical part not merely of narrative journalism, but of intelligent editing. For better or worse, there is an art to constructing a long, narrative piece, and a certain amount of artifice is unavoidable in getting to the heart of the matter. Most journalistic conventions are based on news reporting, where contentnarrowly defined as the Five W'sis the ultimate measure of a piece's worth.