The Washington Post might be full of crap

When Vice President Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor “go fuck yourself” in 2004, the Washington Post reported the story and chose to publish this offending granddaddy of all vulgar words verbatim.

Given the newspaper’s reputation as a “family newspaper,” the printed profanity caused nearly as much outrage as our VP’s choice of address. Executive Editor Leonard Downie even felt the need to clarify the Post’s policy on the use of cuss words on its pages.

When the vice president of the United States says it to a senator in the way in which he said it on the Senate floor,” Downie explained, “readers need to judge for themselves what the word is because we don’t play games at The Washington Post and use dashes.”

Downie’s explanation is why it surprised me that in yesterday’s article on Sarah Palin’s daughter being pregnant, the Post printed the word “crap”.

The word was not an editorial choice; rather, it was part of a source’s quote.

Still, I was so surprised by its appearance in the article that I took a screen shot of the paragraph because I believed editors would delete the word just as soon as they realized it was printed online:

In the long string of things to be offended about, the appearance of the word “crap” in a nationally acclaimed newspaper like The Washington Post does not rank very high.

Additionally, the word itself does not — and should not — exceed the legal standard of obscenity, the Miller test. After all, many words offensive to one generation are often not offensive to the next.

It’s just that even considering the context within which the Post allows profanity, there was no need for it.

I asked my journalist friend Jess what she thought:

“I suppose since it’s a direct quote, they can justify it that way,” Jess told me in an e-mail. “But it seems to me you could write around that if you wanted to.”

I can count several ways in which “crap” did not need to appear in the article. It could have been omitted (after all, doesn’t the word “smears” sufficiently convey Schmidt’s sentiment?). Or it could have been bracketed and replaced by a different word (for example, “[garbage]“) without losing its meaning.

The Post’s OWN decency standards demonstrate a high degree of restraint in its cuss word decision-making.

They even aver that the newspaper “shall avoid profanities and obscenities unless their use is so essential to a story of significance that its meaning is lost without them.

In this example, the word “crap” was not essential to the story. Nor did it add value or help clarify a muddled argument. Rather, it seemed to be quoted merely for its own sake.

Believe me, it doesn’t exactly hurt my sensibilities to see the slang word for excrement in my newspaper of choice. Those who have known me for longer than 5 minutes know I can’t even stop cussing in front of children let alone in my writing.

But if the Post is going to hold itself to its own standards, which reasonably proclaim to “avoid prurience”, it should also consider those words that no longer even seem to offend.

At least until Cheney opens his crap hole again.