Semblance of a polite society
Newspapers have been suffering a lot in recent years with the explosion of media alternatives, and instant and constantly updated news. There’s been a great deal of scrutiny out there over whether they’ll survive, especially with advertisers pulling their dollars and putting ads into savvy Internet sites. These critiques…and I’ve followed them with a lot of interest…always get around to pointing out whatever role newspapers still play for news consumers that might save them from extinction.
Here’s one. Franky, it’s not one I’ve heard before now. WSJ’s Dan Henninger sets it up well…
Some may recall the days when the Li’l Abner comic-strip characters in daily newspapers blew off steam, not with a string of profanities, but with a babbling brook of crazy typewriter symbols: “Why you no good l!!#&+!%l!!”
Thus we were touched to see how the daily press covered the story of the Federal Communications Commission’s losing day in court in the Case of the Fleeting Expletives.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has just ruled that the FCC lacked authority to punish the TV networks for the broadcast of unscripted profanity, or “fleeting expletives,”…
After the decision, editorialists and columnists in newspapers everywhere mocked the FCC’s “moralists” and “language police” for its provably quixotic effort to suppress the most commonly used words–today–in our language. Nevertheless, virtually none of these newspapers could bring themselves to rearrange the famous four letters–k, f, c, u and h, t, s, i–into either word, instead publishing them as f*** and s*** or resorting to euphemisms: “highly pungent,” “oft-heard vulgar words” and “celebrity cursing at awards shows.”
This is an odd reality, isn’t it?
The irony in this quaint typographical reticence and continuing homage to Dr. Bowdler is almost endless. The court’s decision itself is awash across some 40 pages in spelled-out profanities, the most amusing legal read in a long time. What is more, the court’s primary argument is that the entertainers’ use of “f***” was in no sense meant to carry its original, sexual content (see Cheney at Times above). Apparently, no harm, no foul. Indeed the willingness of Judges Pooler and Hall to freely use these expletives in their decision–ranging widely across the legal literature to discover and list examples–reduces their status further, to little more than the common discourse of the courtroom.
But, for no reason immediately obvious, they remain unprintable in a daily newspaper.
And that’s a significant distinction.
If memory serves, the reason given in the olden days for not publishing such words was that these were “family” newspapers, meaning the words might be seen by children around the hearth. But that is explicitly the FCC’s now-overturned reason for wanting these words suppressed on TV.
So what explanation remains for not printing the words in full? Good taste? Well, that is this newspaper’s reason for not spelling it out. We think it’s in bad taste. Perhaps the prohibition at the Journal, a newspaper for adults, is a holdover from the days when profanity was discouraged in the boardroom (if not the newsroom) but free to use after hours in the barroom.
How refreshing to hear one segment of the media talk about upholding the standards of taste. We’ve dumbed down education and defined down the standards of behavior, and all sorts of crude behavior and coarse language that used to offend us are somehow acceptable in this shock culture. Entertainment media are especially loaded with it, and it’s a free-for-all on Internet sites that provide or allow commentary.
Still, I come back to the otherwise uninhibited newspaper industry’s reticence. Perhaps they fear that most of the public, their readers, aren’t quite there yet with this practice. Or perhaps deep in the primeval corner of the editorial soul sits the sense that somehow there really is something not quite right with promoting verbal f’ng and s’ng in public. In other words, perhaps there are defensible reasons for separating “polite society” from what we’ve got now, which is Paulie Walnuts society.
It might not cut much ice with the Second Circuit, but my argument for cutting down on the public profanity…is to avoid undermining the useful virtues of self-discipline and self-restraint.
Don’t underestimate the power of those virtues.
In the really olden days, societies or nations tried to instill some level of self-discipline or social strength primarily for reasons of survival. It helped in case the barbarians decided to invade, as happened in the last century. Then it helped if the nation’s fighting men had a bedrock of personal self-control on the way in, because slovenly people are hard to train. If you have no control over your mouth, what else can’t you control?
Good question.
It’s said that parents are the proper police in this. Parental authority no doubts still counts for something, but the average kid, listening to a parent and measuring it against the verbal tide outside has to conclude that his parents’ views are wholly marginal. What can they possibly be talking about? In the past, parental authority wasn’t from never-never land; it had credibility because the larger society reinforced it. Not now. It’s a jump ball.
Though it may be tipping toward the coarse culture, we still have the leveling influence of the traditional, heavyweight broadsheet newspapers. Even the New York Times.