Ethics Corner: Truth to Be Found in Dirty Language?

By: Allan Wolper It was good old-fashioned Democratic Party politics. Nassau County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi told The New York Times that Attorney General Eliot Spitzer had been running for governor for "a [expletive] year and he hasn't ----." Not that readers would know what he was actually saying.

Still, Suozzi tried to take back whatever it was he said. But Times reporter Patrick D. Healy wouldn't let him. A quote was a quote was a quote. The paper of record would tell it like it was. Sort of.

"People were surprised he used that kind of language," Healy laughed, confirming my suspicion that some of the blanks were expletive-deleted slang expressions referring to a slang term for sex. "Suozzi's folks told me that his mom wasn't happy."

Suozzi's mom might have known what her son had said, but no other newspapers in New York State picked up the Jan. 14 story, according to Healy. I believe they would have if the Times had not doctored Suozzi's colorful comments. And that deprived New York voters of learning how Suozzi behaves when things get down and dirty.

Suozzi knew he had screwed up. So he certainly wasn't going to repeat his mistake to other newspapers.

It reminded me of my first newspaper job, when a crusty old editor refined my copy to clean up the barely comprehensible thoughts of a New Jersey politician. I complained that it made the politician seem smarter than he was, that it seemed unethical. My editor called it a "gift of grammar." The Times gave Suozzi the same kind of gift. It wasn't Healy's fault. He was following his newspaper's policy.

In June 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney, standing on the Senate floor during a photo session, told United States Sen. Patrick Leahy to "fuck yourself." Reporting on the incident, the newspaper of record said Cheney used an "obscene phrase to describe what he thought Mr. Leahy should do." USA Today wrote Cheney told Leahy to "go (expletive) yourself."

Fortunately, The Washington Post was willing to pick up the slack. Why did they do it? "Without the exact words, you would lose the power and the news value of the exchange," Liz Spayd, assistant managing editor of national news, told Washingtonian.

Newspapers know it's unethical to clean up the language of the people they cover. But they convince themselves they're doing the right thing. They're family newspapers. They're worried about their children seeing it. "I was shocked to see how sensitive American ears are," said Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for National Public Radio, who migrated here from the Canadian Broadcasting System. Dvorkin noted that NPR also passed on Cheney's comments. "But we were wrong. I would have used it."

It doesn't matter whether a newspaper is published in a blue or red state. The Anti-Profanity Language Cops are always out in force. But there are ways to thwart them. Mike Needs, public editor for the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, managed to get the phrase "son of a bitch" into an April 2004 column after it was censored out of a "Doonesbury" cartoon in the paper. "You are reading that word here, in this column, because presumably you understand that it is gosh darned difficult to write about certain words without using them," he wrote.

Needs recently told me the Beacon Journal has used some variation of the word "bitch" 410 times since 1985. He wasn't sure about how damning that was, since his paper also covers dog shows.

But the Beacon-Journal almost went all the way when it reported that Akron Mayor Donald Plusquellic had "used the F word" when berating a parking attendant. And Needs didn't have to explain it.

The dictionary euphemism for the F word is "friggin'" or "frickin'," according to several slang dictionaries. Connie Coyne, reader advocate for The Salt Lake Tribune, said one of the paper's columnists regularly used the word "friggin'" to dress up his copy without any reaction from her readers. "I didn't get any complaints," Coyne chuckled, a reference to the fact her red state was viewed as somewhere to the right of Hawaii. "But we got some editors who didn't appreciate it, and they made him stop."

The word "frickin'" recently made its way into the New York Times. David Carr, the paper's columnist on newspaper issues, managed the feat when he reprised the comments New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin made on the Oprah Winfrey show during Hurricane Katrina.

"They have people standing out there, have been in the frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people," Carr accurately quoted Nagin as saying.

And no one made a stink.