Prospero | Profanity

Johnson: Time to grow up

The New York Times should ditch its outdated and silly ban on profanity in the news pages

By R.L.G. | BERLIN

CAN a newspaper cuss? Jesse Sheidlower has written in the New York Times calling for an end to that newspaper’s total refusal to print swear words. This is a tiny bit ironic: Mr Sheidlower, the head of the American Dialect Society, several years ago produced an excellent little reference volume on the word fuck, but it is coyly titled “The F-Word”. (The title is almost certainly not Mr Sheidlower’s fault.)

In any case, his points are well made. Why would a paper intended for adults ban swear words in its pages? To protect children? As the father of a 13-year-old boy, not to mention a former 13-year-old boy himself, Johnson can promise that the only way to raise a child to adulthood without encountering swear words is to chain them in the basement without human contact. Parents, your children have heard swear words, and if they can speak, they have used them. They are unharmed. It is far better to teach a child what words to use and when than to invest the words, Voldemort-style, with such literally unspeakable power that a child cannot help being fascinated.

A second argument is that it is in poor taste for a newspaper to use swear words. But there are two errors here. The first is a theoretical one: the “use-mention distinction”. It would obviously be tasteless for a newspaper’s writers to use offensive language in their own voices. But for a journalist from the Times to report a newsmaker’s gay or racist slur does not make the Times homophobic or racist any more than reporting on a Yankees game makes the journalist a second baseman.

The second issue of “taste” is a journalistic one: simply put, a newspaper’s job is not to report tasteful news. It is to report the news. The horrors of war that the Times reports so excellently are not tasteful. Neither is televised garbage like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”, which the Times has managed to hold its nose and mention in 308 articles. Saveur is in the taste business. The Times is in the news business.

The Times editors seem to think they can convey the important information without mentioning (again, they are not “using”) the blue words. “A blunt expletive”, “an antigay epithet” and “a vulgarity” are meant to convey the substance without offending a tender eyeball. But do these really soften the shock? In the age of Google, any reader who cares will immediately find the word elsewhere. Can the Times really afford to sacrifice readers to satisfy its own prissiness?

And if the reader can, after some puzzlement, figure out the Times’sworkarounds, it only makes the offensive word more memorable and prominent in the mind. As Louis C.K., a comedian, says about the workaround “the N-word”, which he hates, “Why don’t you say it yourself and take some responsibility?” A serious piece of journalism needn’t dwell on vulgar words, but making the reader sit and puzzle out “what is an anti-gay slur that contains a synonym for rooster” has the unintentional effect of highlighting the word.

In any case, the Times often fails to convey the news with these work-arounds: there are many “blunt expletives” and (alas) “antigay epithets”. Yet the Times policy forbids overly accurate descriptions of themselves: reporters, the style book instructs, should not “wink” and nearly use the word in question by implying it with rhymes or asterisks. Better to lose readers to the Huffington Post.

Great newspapers like the Times pride themselves on holding the powerful to account. They would never intentionally obscure a politician’s crime or a businessman’s embezzlement because the deeds concerned were tasteless. When a powerful person uses obscene language, it is that person who has committed the offence against taste. It is the job of journalists to call them out. The Times made an unusual but pleasantly surprising call with this story about Rick Perry, then a presidential candidate. It could not do otherwise, as the word in question was, itself, the story. But the Times would not even report the words of another presidential candidate who insulted their own reporter:

While waiting to speak, he leaned over to his running mate, Dick Cheney, and used an obscenity to describe a New York Times correspondent, Adam Clymer.

The reporter was, in fact, called a “major-league asshole”.

George Bush became president anyway, and Mr Clymer suffered no harm for being so memorably insulted. It was Mr Bush who came off the worse—for those who actually found out what happened. Those readers who did would have found the full story almost anywhere but the New York Times, which allowed itself to be scooped on a story about itself.

“Major-league asshole” is, all things considered, both mild and silly stuff. True slurs, such as those concerning race, sex and disability, can sear the victim. Yet reporting on the damage done no more repeats the damage than publishing a photograph of a victim of physical harm repeats that harm. It’s called journalism, and it is the New York Times’s sole reason for existence.

One reader responded to Mr Sheidlower’s article thus:

This Op-Ed essay was unbelievably timely. I reread your March 29 article “Anti-Semitic Slur by a Westchester Fire Chief Stirs Controversy” a number of times trying to discover just which slurs were used. But the article never used the actual words. And I was left in the dark.

The fire chief called a town supervisor “a sucking Jew bastard”, by the way. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is not in the business of slurring Jews, but it understands the use-mention distinction, and the importance of shocking readers with that which is shocking. The ADL reports the words in full. So should the “paper of record”.

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