On growing up, and down

Dan Savage, sex columnist and editor of The Stranger in Seattle, has some words for daily newspaper people that I wholeheartedly agree with.

You know, there’s some paper’s that take the fucks out of “Savage Love.” People will say they read it online on The Stranger’s site, and it was profanity, and they’re censoring you. No, they’re editing me. I edit a newspaper, and I don’t print everything in it that the writer gives to me. What’s frustrating is that with daily papers, the editors always bitch about their falling readership, their terrible demographics, and then they’re not be able to put two and two together and realize that if you don’t have anything in your paper that’s going to upset a five-year-old then 35-year-olds are going to look elsewhere for the kind of writing that appeals to them and speaks to them.

I mean The New Yorker says the f-word, The New York Review of Books does, and the public does. It’s especially funny the knots that daily papers tied themselves into after Bush called Adam Clymer at The New York Times an asshole. Why couldn’t that be in The New York Times? If the Republican presidential candidate can say it out loud and not lose the election, why is it too toxic for The New York Times? Any 13-year-old who is reading the Times and sees the word asshole in a paragraph after the jump already knows the word. Who are they protecting? They’re protecting the sensibilities of subscribers they should want to get rid of. They can pick up readers who don’t like their newspapers’ writing to be porridge.

The problem is not that we won’t print bad words (which won’t kill anybody if they show up in print): It’s about quavering in fear of our audience. How many time have there been edicts from the glass offices because some perceived offense caused three phonecalls? Other forms of media consider it their God-given duty to make their customers mad, yet we drive ourselves insane trying to keep them all happy.

Or we do obscene things but won’t use obscene language. To put it as bluntly as possible: We’ll fuck over the Cubs fan but won’t put the F-world in the paper.