There Ya Go
I’ll admit it, I’ve been known to drop an F-bomb every now and then, especially on deadline day.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Tara decided to stick a bar of soap in my mouth someday. Not that it would teach me a lesson, but under the right circumstances, one could even hear me from the front office if the wind is right.
“Only I didn’t say fudge,” as Ralphie would lament.
There are four people in my life whom I have never heard use a swear word: my daughter and Tara’s kids. Give ‘em time. It’ll happen.
Look, we all swear from time to time, and we all know there’s one swear word that trumps the rest — the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the F-dashdash-dash word.
It’s one of the few words in our lexicon that has the power to offend others. When I was a kid, I used the F-word once in front of my father on a construction site.
Once.
I knew better than to say it again.
Before last Tuesday, I had never heard a sitting president swear during an interview or speech. But even presidents are human, and I guarantee when the cameras aren’t running, they, too, dabble in the art of profanity from time to time.
Then there’s President Trump. As we all know, this is a man who rarely pulls his verbal punches, and last week during a press conference on the White House lawn, Trump dropped the bomb, so to speak.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing,” he told a group of reporters in reference to Israel and Iran after the countries launched attacks against each other a short time after he had announced a ceasefire agreement.
He didn’t say “fudge” either. Trump swearing isn’t the news here (although using the F-word is hardly presidential). The news to me is how the media handled it.
Airing profanities is a no-no for TV and radio. The Federal Communications Commission has strict rules against swear words, and broadcasting the F-word is a fineable offense. It can be tempting to not censor swears, because they can convey the severity of the moment, but there’s a line here that shouldn’t be crossed.
Newspapers can do a number of things to work around profanity. The most common is reporters also use “expletive” in their stories. I doubt there’s a paper in this country that would print the F-word. Our audience expects more from us than to stoop to the level of using the word in print, however tempting it may be. And believe me, I’ve been tempted on more than one occasion.
I think we can all agree that Trump should know better than to use that word during a live news conference, but as I said, he doesn’t hold back very often and probably doesn’t mind going viral from time to time. He has no filter. He says what’s on his mind and cares not what people say about him or things that come out of his leaky mouth.
I don’t have a problem with Trump swearing as much as I do with how slack the media has become. I find it bothersome that some news outlets didn’t censor Trump’s F bomb.
CNN aired the word uncensored in one of its broadcasts as well as in an online story. Bloomberg left the word uncensored in its story online as did Reuters. I can’t imagine any selfrespecting news organization letting the F-word go 30 years ago. Publishing the F-word, whether it’s in print or online, is as unprofessional as Trump saying it in the first place.
I’m not trying to be prudish, but media should have higher standards.
What are your thoughts? How would you react if you saw this word in one of my columns? A long time ago, I used the word “damn” in a column and my grandma did not like it. Now that I think about it, she would be the fifth person I know who never swore, at least not while I was within earshot.
You won’t see much profanity in the columns and editorials I write. There might be a “damn” here, or a “hell” there, but that’s as far as I’d go.
Oh, fudge!
