It’s not that we’re particularly titillated by dirty words. And we can understand why most newspapers, for the sake of decorum, feel the need to ban them from their pages. Still, when a newsmaker uses the f-word, or any other curse for that matter, to omit it often distorts the perceptions of the reader. What was actually livid fury on the part of the subject quoted too often gets watered down to a portrait of mild exasperation.
Take, for example, this quote from General Tommy R. Franks, lead commander of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Referring to Douglas Feith, the former Pentagon official who helped politicize the intelligence leading up to the war and dropped the ball on post-war planning, the good general said this: “I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.” (You can find that quote on page 281 of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack.)
In the New York Times yesterday, in a weak little article about the reaction of the Georgetown University faculty to Feith’s recent teaching appointment there, the Franks quote, infamous now among Bush-haters, was pulled out of the drawer. Except in the pages of the Times it took this form: “Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, the top commander of the Iraq invasion, once referred to him as ‘the stupidest guy on the face of the earth.'”
Setting aside the fact that the Times messed with the actual quote — without indicating the omission — we have been deprived of the full force of Franks’s rage. Yes, we still get that the general doesn’t like the bureaucrat, but “fucking” is such a taboo adjective that his decision to use it even when talking to Woodward, the administration’s most faithful stenographer, shows just how much he wanted to make his contempt for Feith public.
This, in turn, might offer some further explanation than the article gives as to why Georgetown professors have been leaving Feith to eat his lunch by himself at the cafeteria. Franks couldn’t stand him, why should his academic colleagues?
If newspapers are going to airbrush out the seven dirty words (see: Carlin, George) then they should at least let us know when one of these critical qualifying adjectives has been erased.
Otherwise, how the f–k are we supposed to figure out what someone is really saying?
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.