When Jonathan Martin jumped through hoops last week to avoid using a vulgarity in the lead anecdote of his story, some readers let me know they didn’t like it.
The first two paragraphs of his story on Republican options for 2016 went like this:
CORONADO, Calif. — At the end of the last Democratic presidential administration, Republicans hungry to recapture the White House rallied behind an all-but-anointed candidate to take on Bill Clinton’s heir apparent of that era.
“We settled on George Bush way before the campaign,” said Rob Gleason, the longtime Pennsylvania Republican chairman. With a word more pungent than “slop,” Mr. Gleason recalled, “Everybody was happy: He flew us all down to Austin, and we were like pigs in slop.”
On Twitter, Brian J. Bowe wanted to know why The Times insists, as he put it, on “infantilizing its audience.” It’s not as if 8-year-olds are reading the political coverage anyway, he said.
For a former Times reporter, the author and magazine writer David Margolick, the objection was a different one. He protested putting a word that the speaker never uttered – “slop” – inside quotation marks. And he recalled what he considered a more elegant and appropriate handling of a similar situation a few decades ago in a 1982 story by Clyde Haberman. I asked Mr. Haberman to recall it; he wrote:
I was our City Hall bureau chief. Ed Koch, then early in his second term as mayor, made an ill-considered run for New York governor. It immediately got off to a bad start when, just as he announced his candidacy, Playboy magazine published an interview with him in which he trashed suburban life as “sterile” and “wasting your life.” That interview really hurt him. You’ll see details if you need them in the link.
In that interview, he talked about Carol Bellamy, then the City Council President (a position that no longer exists). They didn’t get along at all. At one point in the interview, he called her “a pain in the ass.”
Perhaps today the full quote would run. But back then, it created a big headache: How should we deal with this vulgarism, which while mild, was more than The Times wished to abide by. It was Al Siegal who rode to the rescue. I can’t remember his title then, but he was effectively the standards editor. He suggested a construction, which I happily used. It appeared in print like so: The Council President, the Mayor said, is “a pain” and he then said where.
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.
I asked the standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, about the complaints. He responded:
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. Some readers think that would be fine; others might find such a barrage off-putting, distracting or offensive.
Under our guidelines, we try to limit use of vulgarities or other potentially offensive language to situations where the specific language is crucial to the story. Otherwise, we avoid the vulgarity — sometimes by paraphrasing, or by choosing a different quote.
Occasionally, we’ll do something like this — preserving the quote but avoiding the vulgarity. In such cases, we must make clear to the reader what we’ve done, as was the case here, so no one will be misled.
I think that approach should be rare, mostly because it can be distracting or seem overly coy. Here, an alternative might have been to use just the first part of the quote — though of course that would have lacked some of the pungency of the full remark.
Mr. Martin told me that he wrote the story as it appeared and that his hoop-jumping wasn’t questioned by copy editors. He found the situation challenging.
“We can’t use the word itself, so that’s not an option,” he said. “We don’t use brackets so that doesn’t work. You’re in a bit of a spot, so I tried to be creative and a little artful.”
Would he prefer to be able to simply call a spade a spade? Mr. Martin was diplomatic: “I think in this era, there’s more pressure on The Times to give up the ghost on some of this stuff.” (And I’m quoting him directly, right down to that last word.)