Press: Whip His What?

Bad word makes big news

In an earlier and more decorous age, a crude word—even if uttered by a President—would surely not be deemed fit to print. O tempora, O mores! When Jimmy Carter told a group of Congressmen at a White House dinner last week that if Senator Edward Kennedy runs against him in 1980, “I’ll whip his ass,” most major news organizations hastened to quote the remark in living off-color.

Though Federal Communications Commission regulations prohibit obscenity or gross indecency, an FCC spokesman said that broadcasting Carter’s broadside was in no way actionable. Radio stations across the country generally played uncensored interviews with the Congressmen who overheard Carter’s statement. A few television newscasts, though, avoided mention of the indelicate word. Jim Ruddle, anchorman at Chicago’s WMAQ-TV, used the term posterior, and Tom Brokaw of NBC’S Today show mumbled slyly about a “three-letter part of the anatomy that’s somewhere near the bottom.” CBS’s Roger Mudd alluded to Carter’s remark without quoting it directly, but a copy of the New York Post’s anatomically correct front-page headline was projected on a screen behind him.

The Post was one of few major newspapers to put the entire quote in a banner headline. Most of the others were not far to the posterior. The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Sun-Times managed to get the crucial word in a headline, and the full quote in the story. “We don’t bandy about with words if they come from the President,” said Los Angeles Times Managing Editor George Cotliar. “Without [the quote] there is no story.”

Other papers played it coy. CARTER FLEXES HIS WHIP ARM winked Boston’s Herald American, which used the quote. In its headline, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner used three dots instead of the verboten word, then spelled it out in the story. Said Managing Editor Mary Anne Dolan: “It seemed an intriguing way of handling it. Just like a woman being more alluring in lingerie than in the nude.”

One of the few papers to avoid using the word altogether was the ever circumspect New York Times, which last made censorship history by excising the word screw from a story about Carter’s 1976 Playboy interview (“a vulgarism for sexual relations,” substituted the Times). This time the paper buried the quote on page 26 and left a dash where the word ass should have been. “If the Times gives up its ass, it will have to be for a better story than this,” chuckled Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal. “I just think it was more fun not to use it when everybody else did.”

It was certainly more intriguing—or confusing—to Times readers.