News Media Urged To Stop Censoring Profanity In Print

The standard practice of American print media when a news story has a profanity or offensive term in it, even when it's a key part of the story, is to replace a few letters with asterisks or write things like "an obscenity," or "an epithet" or "the n-word."

But Jesse Sheidlower, the president of the American Dialect Society and author of The F-Word, wrote in a New York Times op-ed Monday (March 31st) that the word avoidance should stop.

He said, "These circumlocutions actually deprive readers of the very thing these institutions so grandly promise: news and information. . . . the mainstream media need to accurately report language that is central to their stories."

Sheidlower notes that the precedent already exists, with the Associated Press, for example, saying in its stylebook that although obscenities should be avoided, they can be printed if there's a, quote, "compelling reason" to do so and if they are a part of direct quotations. Sheidlower writes that society's comfort level with offensive language has changed dramatically and news media needs to keep pace, saying that the avoidances used, quote, "make stories read as if they were time capsules written decades ago, forcing us all into wink-wink-nudge-nudge territory."