The News Censored

Censoring profanity
to control the content of the news

"The important thing is the obvious thing that no one is saying," wrote the poet Charles Bukowski. And so it needs to be stated here: Censorship is killing the news media. I guess that's an easy thing for a pornographer to say, but I'm not talking about money shots, gapes, and ATM scenes. I'm speaking of the daily and 24-hour news media suitable for children, palatable for octogenarians and relevant for almost no one.

From an editor's point of view, from the producer's point of view no doubt the questions are: Do we show the bloodied, roasted corpse in Baghdad? Do we play the footage of the soldiers driving their tanks with "burn, motherfucker, burn" playing in the background? And if we do, will we be fined by the FCC? Will we lose subscriptions? Will we lose advertisers? And that's part of it, but that doesn't address the culture of censorship that has caused people to lose faith in the news.

Profanity has become a part of our culture. Hang out in any middle school cafeteria in America and within minutes you'll hear an earful of language that is not fit for print or broadcast. Compare that with your local news anchors. The well-spoken talking heads who pale at the words shit, damn, hell, who live in fear of loosing their jobs at the slightest slip of the tongue.

What the media doesn't realize is the squeaky clean nature of their newscasts make them seem surreal and therefore incredible. Say they may quote a talking head saying: "The Bush administration's approach to diplomacy lacks subtlety and is often intransigent." A lot of Americans can't get their heads around that. Some people are just plain dumbasses, but most are just easily bored.

But if the media quotes a White House official saying: "Their idea of diplomacy is to say, 'Look fucker, you do what we want,"1 most Americans can get their heads around that. The "Look fucker" quote by the way comes from a real government official, former deputy secretary of state in the Bush administration, Dick Armitage, and a real journalist, the esteemed Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. But it did not appear in a newspaper; it's buried, instead, several hundred pages deep in Woodward's book State of Denial. Had it appeared as a headline in The Post it would have signaled a stellar change in the course of journalism.

What else are we missing? We don't really know because there's nothing to compare. There are no examples of stellar uncensored daily news coverage in America. The only way we can even guess what we're missing is to compare HBO with the rest of television.

Bill Maher's network TV show sucked. But in his defense it's an oxymoron to broadcast a show called Politically Incorrect on the most censored media in America. On HBO, he's a rock star, not just because he says "fuck" at will, but because he can criticize, lament, and joke freely without the fear of being fired.

Censoring content in the name of profanity

The corporate message is clear: You let a guy say fuck, sure as shit he's gonna end up calling the president a dick. Censor profanity to control the content.

Consider sitcoms, dramas, crime shows that you've seen over the decades on network TV. With a few notable exceptions -- All in the Family, Barney Miller, NYPD Blue, and MASH come to mind –most of them have sucked. Compare that to HBO's Oz. How do you sugarcoat a man sodomizing another man with a spoon? Network television could have never touched Oz, even if there was not a single word of profanity in it, because the themes of the show itself were too mature for network television.

This is what news executives don't understand -- or if they do they're not doing anything about it: When you censor a specific set of words or images, you censor themes. Whole swathes of information move beyond your reach. Journalists become tattletales; stenographers for bloody do-gooders and political hit men like Karl Rove.

Want to understand the news? Read a book

Where do journalists excel? Ironically, in books. George Packer's Assassin's Gate comes to mind as a good book about Iraq, with dozens of anecdotes and stories that should have been on CNN every day, but they were not. People quoted in the book used profanity. They were often not "official sources" but merely soldiers. The author placed his perspective in the narrative. Parts of it were brainy and required careful reading -- all of which disqualifies it from the 24-hour news cycle.

Another one, a Pulitzer prize winner, Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: the Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 comes to mind as a great work of journalism. Ghost Wars details the history of American involvement in Afghanistan and how American money that funded the majahideen eventually funded al Qaeda.

It detailed what is self-evident: At the upper echelons of the Pakistani and Saudi governments, the United States has friends, but in the intelligence agencies and other power niches of both countries, the United States has many enemies. The fact that Osama in all likelihood is hiding in Pakistan bears this out. The fact that oil money funneled to Saudi Arabia reached religious schools that indoctrinated the terrorists who took down our buildings bears this out. Shame it's in a book and not in your local daily. We might then have an intelligent television debate about what's going on in the Middle East. Instead we get bullshit. But no one can say it's bullshit, not on TV anyway.

Let's examine one more quote from Woodward's State of Denial (not to pick on Woodward, he is a great journalist; he just embodies a simple fact -- you want to write about the "rat fuckers" of any generation, you gotta do it in a book, not a newspaper).

Notice below how Woodward describes HBO's Baghdad ER, a documentary about a support hospital in Baghdad:

"The documentary was a gripping gory depiction of the horrors of war visited on those shredded, maimed and killed by IEDs, bullets, and mortars. The central character is the soldier's body. Up-close shots inside the ER show legs and arms that had been blown off or must be amputated. Soldiers arrive with bloodied, shrapnel-shredded faces and shrapnel embedded in everything from limbs and chests to an eye. Many of the survivors are medically evacuated to hospitals in Germany or to Walter Reed. The many who die are shown being placed or encased in black body bags. Blood is endlessly mopped up from the operating room floors."2

Given Woodward's review one would the think the show was a gore fest on par with A Nightmare on Elm Street. But that's far from the case. He's not mentioning the rooftop scene. He's not mentioning that in reality the injured Americans shown in the film were, by and large, the survivors. The documentary did not focus on the dead strewn about the streets of Baghdad, though one suspects the corpses were indeed available for filming.

Why is Woodward appalled to the point of exaggeration? HBO broke the rules. Television journalists are not supposed to show gore of any kind. That's for movies. For DVDs. It's not for television. Journalists have been abused to believe that showing real violence is somehow akin to showing sensationalized violence.

Consider this: A great actor of our time, Denzel Washington, plays a role in which he is shot in the buttock. He grimaces a bit but then, following the script, manages to carry on for the last segment of the movie. It just wouldn't have been the same if the bullet had ricocheted into his abdomen and caused him to crumple over and die in whimpering agony for the last 20 minutes of the film.

The same goes with war movies and crime movies of all kinds: Heroes and villains alike get shot and either die quickly or plod on heroically. It would not do to show a bullet from an assault rifle hitting the hero just below the knee, ripping off the bottom part of his leg, and then have him bleed out and die in a few minutes, though in reality that's the most likely result when an assault rifle bullet hits bone.

Journalists believe they cannot show this because if they do then they are somehow in league with Freddy Kruger, when in reality just the opposite is true. Kids of all ages watch movie violence and think gunshot wounds are painless and quick. Journalists could show that they are not -- that people scream, cry, defecate, urinate, writhe in agony when shot, that limbs are blown off -- but they don't. Instead journalists perpetuate the illusion that war is clean, that smart bombs blow up buildings and cars but not people. And if the people are blown up, that's not for public consumption.

As I write this, I can hear the editors, ombudsman, and owners quibbling about this and that consideration. So let's consider Abu Ghraib. Remember the picture of the female soldier, cigarette in mouth, giving the thumbs up and pointing at the guy's penis? His penis was blurred. His penis was also erect. News censors want us to believe that they only cut expletives, meaningless sounds of speech that add no substance to a story. But in the Abu Ghraib case not showing the erection stopped millions of Americans from understanding the full scope of the story.

To make a guy stand nude with his limp pecker hanging there is humiliating. It's bad, but it's something that goes on at frat houses all across America. It's hazing, not torture.

To make a devout Muslim masturbate in front of an American woman is sexual torture. He would only do it under duress. And it will torment him for the rest of his life. The news censors can dance around this fact all they want, contort themselves until they're blue in the face and staring up at their own scrotums, but they were lying by omission to the American public. They were deliberately withholding information that prevented Americans from understanding just how fucking horrible we were treating the prisoners of Abu Ghraib.

But what about kids seeing erections on television? Allow me to submit the proposition that news about war is inherently unsuitable for children, and when you make it suitable children, you render it irrelevant for adults. Put simply: Don't censor news for adults in the name of protecting kids. War news is not for kids.

But what about cancelled subscriptions, cancelled advertising contracts? Damn right. These are serious concerns. But it's also mistaken logic. Papers are failing because they've been caving in to corporate and government censors and muzzling their reporters.

A more pertinent concern is that individual journalists need more protection because ultimately we're not talking about journalists who refuse to do their jobs; we're talking about corporations who refuse to let journalists do their jobs. Left to their own devices, there are enough good journalists to get the stories out, tortured erections and all. It's the corporations who are stopping them -- corporations and the FCC.

Somehow we've got to let journalists do what they do best: Publish what they perceive. If they happen to be holding a camera when a guy gets blown to bits, Americans need to see it, especially if the device that blew the guy to bits was paid for with American tax dollars.

Does this mean breaking up media conglomerates? We can only hope. Does it mean enacting federal laws to allow journalists more protection, to keep them from losing their jobs if they make a slip of the tongue or if they report their own perceptions against a corporation's wishes? Probably. Does it mean local television news stations should be able to quote people who use profanity without being fined by the FCC? Absolutely. It must happen.

It seems appropriate to end this piece with a quote from a man who had a lot to do with stopping the censorship of stand-up comedians. On his album "Bicentennial Nigger," Richard Pryor says something like: We are gathered here to celebrate two hundred years of white folks kicking ass . . . how long, how long will this bullshit go on?

With a smile to the late great Mr. Pryor we must acknowledge there's a reason we have a profoundly ignorant frighteningly superstitious man in the White House. There's a reason we were duped into an un-winnable war. There's a reason presidential elections are more about style than substance. It starts with censorship, with the little things, the obvious things, that no one is mentioning. From there, the rest is easy.

1 Bob Woodward, State of Denial (Simon & Schuster), 2006, p. 329

2 Bob Woodward, State of Denial (Simon & Schuster), 2006, p. 466-467