Jesse Jackson and printing vulgarities

[Brian White]

What does everyone think about some papers' printing Jesse Jackson's quote about Barack Obama ("I want to cut his nuts off.") and other leaving it out entirely (The New York Times) or obfuscating (The Washington Post's "that he wanted to castrate the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.")?

Afterward, Post media critic Howard Kurtz and Times public editor Clark Hoyt both weighed in for printing it.

I blogged about this a few days ago and again today, and I am firmly on the side of printing an obscenity (or in this case, vulgarism) when the impetus for the story is the obscenity or vulgarism. Why force the reader to Google it? That's another way to make readers think newspapers are obsolete.

Link to Kurtz (17th item, from Falls Church, Va.): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/07/11/DI2008071102165.html/
Link to Hoyt: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13pubed.html?scp=4&sq=jesse+jackson&st=nyt
Links to my blog items: http://talkwordy.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/he-said-what-no-really-tell-me-what-he-said/
http://talkwordy.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/papers-criticize-themselves-over-jacksons-nuts-quote/

[Chris Huff]

A quote is a quote. No one should change the words used and include quotation marks. That's dishonest.

I don't think there is such a thing as a "dirty" word. I've never understood the American need to censor real words as used by real people in various media outlets, while the glorification of violence goes all but unchecked. It's absurd, really.

Nuts. There. No one was corrupted by that word. Forty-nine percent of the population has at least two. Some 51% of the population has one or fewer.

[Neil Holdway]

Here's a larger question: Should the media make a big deal out of such a thing anyway?

I know the answer to that question: At some point, we have to report on it, because once it gets around, it's news, and people will want to know what everyone's talking about.

Just like I know the answer to the other question: Most don't print the vulgar word because a good portion of our readers still are offended by it. Writing around it sounds ridiculous, that's true, but while a lot of people went to Google to find out what the word was, a lot of people ... didn't.

In the end it really depends on your audience.

[Dan Puckett]

Here's a larger question: Should the media make a big deal out of such a thing anyway?

When one of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders — a man who worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who has been at the forefront of the movement for longer than most Americans have been alive, and who was the most successful African-American candidate for president until Barack Obama — indicates displeasure with the man who apparently will be the first African-American presidential nominee of a major party, a displeasure so extreme that he employs a vulgar, vivid, violent image to express it, yeah, I think that's kind of a big deal.

Maybe not a huge deal — he didn't advocate literal violence or endorse John McCain — but a biggish deal, at least.

[Dan Puckett]

I've never understood the American need to censor real words as used by real people in various media outlets, while the glorification of violence goes all but unchecked. It's absurd, really.

I don't think it's a peculiarly American phenomenon; plenty of languages and cultures — if not all of them — have taboo-avoidance issues.

Look at the Russians and their struggles with mat.

If the decision were mine, I'd print "nuts." To understand what he said, you have to know what he said, and all the circumlocutions I've seen hinder that understanding to some degree or another.

[editer]

I don't find "nuts" to be particularly vulgar. The full, exact quote may be described as vulgar, and colloquial, but unprintable? Nuts.

[Jim Thomsen]

I think editors were squeamish about prompting readers to visualize castration.

I agree with those who say it's a big deal and that the quote should be preserved in its entirety.

My reasoning may be different, however. My feeling is that many editors who paraphrased, rewrote or deleted portions of the quote used the knee-jerk maxim of "We're a family newspaper." That's a 1950s maxim that I believe has little basis in reality today. A big part of keeping our credibility is in reflecting the world as it is today, not in selling that out to safeguard the sensibilities of little old churchgoing ladies and children who probably already know all the bad words already.

I think most of the editors who took a heavy hand in this case don't know their audiences as well as they think they do — just the .002 percent who react loudly stridently whenever they get upset by what they see in print.

[Neil Holdway]

At one time our political writer had a lead on a follow-up to this event that was something like: "Some people think what Jesse Jackson said about Barack Obama was, well, nuts." I was disappointed when he didn't go with it in the end.