Tuesday, July 18, 2006

What is this s---?

I remember the olden days, when the NYT famously did not print profanity, yet included some in the transcripts of Nixon's secretly recorded meetings. Somebody protested to Abe Rosenthal that the paper didn't seem to know its own policy, and he said, "I suppose the policy is that we'll take 'shit' from the president of the United States, but nobody else."

The Star Tribune, will, too. See Anders Gyllenhaal's blog note on the decision to use the quote here.

What did your paper do?
–Howard Weaver

2 comments:

  1. We stuck with "s---." The deciding factor for me: community sensibilities. I figure the dashed version got the point across clearly but we didn't have to rub readers' noses in it, so to speak.

    If I were in a larger metro area, I reckon I'd have run it in full. But not here, where we have cows and conservatives in equal numbers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. We stuck with our standard approach of s---. The word did not seem to us to be important; in fact, in my opinion it was a distraction to the more compelling news that Bush was looking to Syria.

    ReplyDelete

 
/*