NYT NSFW
Back in 2003 my jaw dropped to find the word “asses” on the New York Times’ front page. Today, it dropped again: There, in Tom Friedman’s column, was the full quotation from President Bush’s now notorious open-mike moment at the summit in Russia in all its barnyard epithet glory. The Times hadn’t published Bush’s “shit” in its news columns, which bowdlerized the president, referring to his choice word as “a vulgarity.” But Friedman boldly seized the four-letter moment in his op-ed column. I assume this is some by-product of the bureaucratic Maginot Line that separates the Times’ news department from its editorial and op-ed pages.
It used to be that the niceties were supposed to be observed in newspapers because of the old “breakfast table” argument and related “protect the children” rationales. In an era when the breakfast table (and the kids) are treated to depressingly regular displays of mangled corpses, grieving relatives and collateral-damage rubble, those niceties simply seem out of touch with reality.
POSTSCRIPT: Lance Knobel points us to this fascinating post by Benjamin Zimmer on the Language Log, chronicling the Times’ publication (in transcript, though not in news columns) of “shit” as used by Nixon on the Watergate tapes. A.M. Rosenthal then made clear that the Gray Lady was not swooning into the gutter, saying “We’ll only take shit from the President.”
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July 21st, 2006 at 4:33 pm
I suspect you’re right about different standards for columnists and news, but you should read Benjamin Zimmer’s definitive post on the Times’s history of using “shit”: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003367.html
If you follow the link to his earlier item on the subject, you’ll find a great quote from AM Rosenthal on his paper’s use of “shit” in its publication of the Nixon tapes: “We’ll take ’shit’ from the president, but nobody else.”
July 22nd, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Thanks for the mention. By the way, as I noted in my Language Log post, the New York Times did actually print Bush’s shit in a news report — you can find it in the “overview” piece by Steven Erlanger and Jad Mouawad. Why it appeared there and not in Jim Rutenberg’s piece which was specifically about Bush’s overheard comments, I have no idea.