Scaramucci’s Vulgar Rant Spurs Newsroom Debate: Asterisks or No Asterisks?
- 7 years ago
Scaramucci’s Vulgar Rant Spurs Newsroom Debate: Asterisks or No Asterisks?
“Scaramucci’s words satisfied the first part of that restriction, but editors concluded there wasn’t a compelling reason to use the profanity.”
This is not the first time news organizations have struggled with how to present objectionable words uttered by Mr. Trump or his staff.
Lemon was wrestling with a thorny problem that was challenging all news organizations: Just hours earlier, The New Yorker had
published an interview with Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump’s new communications director, that was a censor’s nightmare.
“What makes them newsworthy is not just that it came from such a high source but
that such objectionable language was directed at other people in the White House,” said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute for journalism.
After the first Republican debate two years ago, Mr. Trump said
that Megyn Kelly, then a Fox News host, had “blood coming out of her wherever,” a remark that was widely viewed as referring to her menstrual cycle.
“The AP’s rules prohibit use of obscenities, racial epithets or other offensive slurs ‘unless they are part of direct quotations
and there is a compelling reason for them,’” an Associated Press reporter wrote in an article about the challenges Mr. Scaramucci’s remarks posed for newsrooms.
By SYDNEY EMBERJULY 28, 2017
“I can probably say that word, but I just won’t,” the CNN host Don Lemon said on Thursday
night, as he tangled with the obscenity-laced quotations that were displayed on screen.
“Scaramucci’s words satisfied the first part of that restriction, but editors concluded there wasn’t a compelling reason to use the profanity.”
This is not the first time news organizations have struggled with how to present objectionable words uttered by Mr. Trump or his staff.
Lemon was wrestling with a thorny problem that was challenging all news organizations: Just hours earlier, The New Yorker had
published an interview with Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump’s new communications director, that was a censor’s nightmare.
“What makes them newsworthy is not just that it came from such a high source but
that such objectionable language was directed at other people in the White House,” said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute for journalism.
After the first Republican debate two years ago, Mr. Trump said
that Megyn Kelly, then a Fox News host, had “blood coming out of her wherever,” a remark that was widely viewed as referring to her menstrual cycle.
“The AP’s rules prohibit use of obscenities, racial epithets or other offensive slurs ‘unless they are part of direct quotations
and there is a compelling reason for them,’” an Associated Press reporter wrote in an article about the challenges Mr. Scaramucci’s remarks posed for newsrooms.
By SYDNEY EMBERJULY 28, 2017
“I can probably say that word, but I just won’t,” the CNN host Don Lemon said on Thursday
night, as he tangled with the obscenity-laced quotations that were displayed on screen.