Bob Collins[Updated to include NPR comments]
There’s a game that broadcasters had to play last week when Anthony Scaramucci’s interview in the New Yorker included a heaping helping of junior high school lewd comments.
NPR wouldn’t touch it on Morning Edition Friday. “The FCC is listening,” host Steve Inskeep said during his talk with NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith during the show’s Up First podcast.
Of course, the FCC doesn’t control podcasts and the network was free to say whatever it wished, and, understandably, the anchors didn’t want to mention the words any more than I want to right now.
Why? Because it’s a matter of normalcy, civility, and good taste, all of which have been thrown out the window by the current Washington administration and a new breed of journalists who think that throwing an F-bomb in a headline really punches it up.
“We considered it carefully,” Mark Memmot, NPR’s standards and ethics boss tells the NPR ombudsman. “It was important to convey the nature of his comments and not completely ‘cover’ them with asterisks. He is, after all, in charge of White House communications and was speaking about other top advisors to the president. As for which words we did and didn’t ‘asterisk,’ it’s hard to explain any better than to simply say that some felt more offensive than others. We did, as you see, advise readers about the language before they would see it.”
As John Oliver pointed out last evening on his HBO program, it makes for an interesting exercise in winking at the audience.
Not suitable for the workplace, as if I needed to tell you.
