The New York Times last week showed its usual squeamishness about language when it discussed allegations of sexual misconduct against a pop-philosopher of some note. The journalist writing the article noted how, “In recent years, he ( the philosopher) has pursued a more popular bent, writing books on movies, sports and Shakespeare, along with cheekier projects like a short 2008 volume subtitled A Critique of Mental Manipulation (the title is unpublishable here).”
Dr. Bawdy put his research staff on this immediately and found the title that the journalist said was “unpublishable here” to be “Mind-Fucking.” What is truly mind-fucking is how frightened the Times and its journalists are of certain words. This hearkens back to when the Times couldn’t find it in itself to fully print Jimmy Carter’s comment as to how he was going to whip Teddy Kennedy’s ass and when one of its own reporters, Adam Clymer, had been identified by Dubya as a “major league asshole”—reporting only that “He used an obscenity.”
What is obscene is the Times fucked up sense of priorities and prudishness. What is obscene is not a few colorful words which should be recorded for the sake of accurate reporting—but the Times reporting which fails to address the obscene use of power and justifies excursions such as the Iraq war through truly fucked up reporting such as that of Judith Miller which allowed her and the Times to become hand-maidens of the administration in justifying an illegal and immoral enterprise.
Directly from the desk of Dr. Bawdy – http://bawdylanguage.com/blog
Leave a Reply