What words — if any — are your news organizations not willing to print?

I don’t believe there is a traditional media organization (in the U.S. at least) that is willing to print every word in the English language, especially those deemed offensive.

My paper is willing to print “shit” in a story but only in certain editions. Our Mideast edition is keeping the word, while our editions in Europe and the Pacific are dropping it. The Web will not feature the word as well.

Here is the passage that will be edited with [expletive] in most editions:

The reminders of danger are never far away. A huge explosion one recent Friday rocked the city just before 7 a.m. A suicide truck bomber had blown himself up at a police station about a mile away. The next day, five soldiers were packing up tents they’d recently vacated when the staccato crack-crack-crack of automatic weapons ripped through the air.

The fusillade sounded as if it were right overhead. Spc. Jeremy Epps didn’t even flinch, as the others scrambled for cover. They laughed at his bravado.

“Man, the neighborhood I grew up,” said Epps, 28, from Indianapolis. “That shit don’t bother me.”

That last quote makes this passage work. War is gritty. It’s the reality on the ground.

For those of you who don’t know, Stars and Stripes is only printed overseas. It’s the official newspaper of the Department of Defense with the majority of our (print) readership currently in the Mideast because of the two wars. Many of our readers have witnessed far worse things than words that may offend some notion of community standards.

The expletive was left in the Mideast edition because it’s a theater of war. The feeling was that troops in combat have a different community standard than those living on base with their families.

That leads us into the notion that newspapers are for families, despite the fact that the younger portions of most families do not read newspapers. Let’s make this clear: there is no such thing as a family newspaper when the average newspaper reader is around 5 million years old.

Maybe it is a fair compromise to use [expletive] in editions of the paper not serving people in combat. Maybe our readers in the Middle East want their stories gritter, more real, while readers on bases in Germany, Japan and elsewhere want a paper that adheres to more standard journalism practices when it comes expletives. Most papers wouldn’t have made a comprise — they would have censored any remotely borderline word in every edition.

I don’t claim to have all the answers in this situation, but I do think it is a bizarre construct that supposed 1st amendment publications censor themselves arbritarily based on some notion of community standards (in the U.S. at least). This situation at Stars and Stripes could have gone either way, and a compromise was reached. In this situation, I’m willing to bet none of our readers will care.

I’m not sure, however, how one justifies how the Los Angeles Times censored Tribune overlord Sam Zell’s comment. The Times reported that Zell uttered a “two-word obscenity” at a photographer.

The problem, of course, is that there are a lot of two-word obscenities. There is no point in censoring something if people won’t have any idea what you’re writing about. His obscenity, by the way, was the crux of the story. Omitting makes it a no news story.

One final thought: perhaps the reason why so many conversational and occasionally snarky blogs are popular is because people have grown tired of the dowdy Mainstream Media that won’t even print obscenities — in the Times’ case — that are essential to the story.

The Web is grittier, more real than printed publications, and I think that’s something users connect with a lot more.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 1:19 pm and is filed under State of journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.