When the Times sees fit to unleash the F-bomb

This post is one in a partnership between the Rochester Beacon and veteran reporter Gary Craig, featuring articles published on his Substack site.

The New York Times recently carried a story, “The Filthy Word That Filmmakers Swear By.”

The subheadline: “How directors and writers striving for a PG-13 rating have learned to ration the use of a four-letter obscenity.”

The focus of the story is probably obvious: To keep a PG-13 rating, and avoid an R, a filmmaker has to limit the use of the F-bomb, if it is used. (The guardrails on violence are not as strict. This is America after all. As the late Todd Snider sang: “Violent problems need violent solutions, ’cause in America, we like our bad guys dead. It’s called ‘box office,’ baby.”)

Before reading the Times story I surveyed some of the numerous photos and captions that were part of the article’s package; all were scenes from films with examples of how the F-word had been curtailed or deleted for ratings purposes. The word was partially redacted in the examples.

Yet, in the third paragraph of the story, writing of the Adam Sandler hit “Billy Madison,” was this: “But the script also had 25 too many uses of the word ‘fuck’ for a PG-13 rating.”

Wait, what? This is The New York Times. True, its standards have changed through the years, just as have those of society – we can argue whether for better or worse – but still: This is The New York Times.

Elsewhere in the story, speaking of the violence vs. profanity in ratings, was screenwriter Tony Kushner, who collaborated with Steven Spielberg on “Lincoln.”

He said, “I’d much rather have a kid hear somebody say ‘go fuck yourself,’ than have them watch someone blow somebody’s brains out in this kind of voluptuous, pornographic fountain of guts and brains and skull matter.”

There again was the word in full.

The changing of Times

Using the search engine newspapers.com I tried to see how common or uncommon this was with the Times. (I was stunned when a 1911 edition popped up, only to see the search engine had misread the name “Fuchs.”) I had little luck, though was surprised how The Guardian has no hesitancy with the word. Who says the Brits are prim and proper?

I turned to Google and simply asked about the usage of the word in the Times. Sure enough, its willingness to leave the profanity pure is a relatively recent turn with the Gray Lady. It was Donald Trump who forced the Times to reconsider its avoidance approach. Go figure.

I’ll turn to the online publication Quartz for an explanation:

The morning after a 2005 videotape of Donald Trump remarking to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that fame gave him license to “grab [women] by the pussy,” the shame-resistant Republican presidential nominee was finally suffering consequences for his outrageous statements. But for the media organizations covering his comments, this was a big moment on another level.

After what one New York Times editor described as “extensive discussion,” the Times broke one of its cardinal style rules: The words fuck, pussy, bitch, and tits appeared in print on the front page.

To be fair, Quartz also noted that Trump’s language was not an outlier. It wrote:

But the boundaries between polite society and popular culture had been blurring long before Donald Trump came on the scene. These changes in public discourse have made profanity more prevalent and therefore less shocking—which only makes the Times’ position seem increasingly outdated. In fact, profanity has become so commonplace that the Times has had to find ways to report obscenities without actually using the obscenities themselves. Even when the subject of the story is a profanely named product, the Times will coyly write around it: The best-selling picture book Go the Fuck to Sleep, for instance, was the subject of three Times articles that failed to mention the title.

My D&C profanity

We had a similar discussion once at the Democrat and Chronicle when I had the word ‘shit’ in a quote. Typically I’d do the standard “s**t” or “expletive deleted”—I always thought during the Nixon administration that that would be a good band name—but this instance was different.

Photographer and friend Shawn Dowd and I had traveled to Missouri to report on an execution as part of a story on New York’s approval of the death penalty in 1996. Despite what appeared to be legitimate claims of innocence, the condemned was executed. (To be clear, he was at the murder scene, but his brother, serving life in prison, may have done the crime.)

The next day Shawn and I returned to the prison and interviewed another Death Row inmate.

The 100-inch story (trimmed from 150 inches) ended with his interview. Here are the final three paragraphs, which were part of a talk about spirituality and death:

“When the life on earth is done, it just cuts the cord that ties the boat to earth and you can sail into smoother seas,” he says.

But, deep down, he wants help. He asks that anybody who might be able to save him from Death Row write to him at the prison.

“When a death is on you,” he says, “it’s scary as shit.”

Clearly, the story would have been weakened if we messed with its very final word.

Also, this Death Row inmate was not executed. He made multiple claims of innocence during our interview.

Those claims, as it turned out, were true.

The Marvelous Molly Ivins

All of this made me think of the story from the late columnist Molly Ivins—man, I wish she were alive now—who once had worked for the Times. The Times once reassigned Ivins after she referred to an annual chicken slaughter in a New Mexico town as a “gang-pluck.”

(It was Ivins who once wrote of a congressman, “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.”)

Ivins later told the story of how she was called into the Times headquarters—she then worked in the western U.S.—and chastened by executive editor Abe Rosenthal, who was angry with Ivins’ wordplay. She had clearly meant to plant a word other than “pluck” in the minds of readers, he had realized.

“And I was abruptly recalled from the mountain West (bureau), sort of like a defective automobile, told to report to New York immediately for reassignment,” Ivins recounted, according to a story in the Times about Ivins’ tenure there. “I went in to talk to Abe.

“He observed that I had a tendency to stick my thumb in the eye of The New York Times. And I said: ‘No, Abe, I don’t. The problem is I just never really have understood where y’all draw the line, and when it’s pointed out to me where you draw the line, my honest reaction is: You got to be — ’”

In keeping with the Times then-tradition, Ivins’ exact words were excised from the 2016 article.

We can only imagine what they were.

Gary Craig is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A retired Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he now writes on Substack.

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