NY Times Public Editor Addresses Why the Paper Doesn’t Swear More
You ever see curse words censored in newspapers and wonder, “The fuck is up with this shit?” Well, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has heard your complaints, and addressed them online today.
News outlets like the Times generally tend to dance around using profane language, even sometimes to absurd degrees. There are exceptions, like when they printed “shit” in a 2007 article, and in 2013, for the first time in years, they ran their first-ever f-bomb with an excerpt from a new novel.
Sullivan wrote today that she heard from readers after one Times article quoted someone as saying “pigs in slop” while making it very clear the word the person actually used was not “slop.”
Times standards editor Philip Corbett told her, “If we were to print vulgarities every time a politician, or a sports figure, or even a newspaper editor uttered one, we would print quite a lot of them.” The paper, of course, tries to limit the use of profane words.
Here’s Sullivan’s take on the matter:
But why, some want to know, must The Times go to such lengths? This is something I’ve considered a few times, and come to the conclusion that sometimes it would be preferable just to spit out the word and be done with it. However, I’ve heard from many Times readers who appreciate the restrictions.
By the way, there are no profane words in her post.
[image via Victor Maschek/Shutterstock]
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