Cincy Enquirer apologizes for photo with F-word
Presses were stopped at Cincinnati Enquirer over the weekend after someone spotted “Fuck” in a photo. Thousands of Sunday papers were tossed out and the photo was changed for the new run.
“This is the same Louisville ‘design hub’ which inserted the word “fuck” in the Greenville News back in December,” a Romenesko reader writes. “Digital copies of the offending Enquirers haven’t appeared because the photo was caught early in the run. Only a a few thousand of those papers got delivered. The remainder of the offending papers were destroyed at the printing plant. It’s no closely guarded secret. Editor Carolyn Washburn has been fielding reader complaints and discussed the response with staff.”
She distributed this memo — first posted on Gannett Blog — on Monday afternoon:
Sent: Mon 4/16/2012 4:10 PM
From: Carolyn Washburn
To: Cin-News Users
Cc:
Subject: in case you are getting calls about a photo in Sunday’s paperA photo ran on the state government page of a protestor holding up a sign that used the word f#*&. It was caught on the press and replated but it still went out to several thousand homes.
Here is how I am responding.
Yes, the photo was completely inappropriate, on many levels.
I learned about this after midnight Saturday when someone in our operation saw this photo and alerted us. We stopped the presses to change the photo and threw out thousands of papers still sitting at our dock. Unfortunately a few thousand papers had already gone out to carriers.
I deeply apologize and am working this morning to understand why this photo was chosen in the first place and why it was not caught sooner. I take this very seriously.
Again, I apologize.
Carolyn
* Earlier: “Fuck” is put into the third paragraph of a Greenville News story
A news photo of a protester holding a sign … sounds remarkably like “News” to me.
The over-clenched honchos at Gannett just never seem to learn the downside of their control-freak culture. Gannett’s draconian overreactions to moments of “meh” is not helping its brand (apologizing for publishing news this week; last week, firing a reporter before he even started because he end-ran the P.R. machine to announce the hire; the week before that … .)
What the fuck is wrong with the word fuck?
I sincerely hope that no one is fired because of this.
Yeah, it should have been caught, no doubt about that. But it’s not the end of the world. Mistakes do happen.
I remember one time the copy editors didn’t catch that on the front page the previous day’s date was on it. The executive editor had kittens over that and threaten to fire the copy desk chief.
Guess what? That mistake never happened again.
And I’m willing to beat that will be the case here.
Sorry, Bill Reader, but this one is legit. The reaction might be on the overwrought side, but the bottom line is if you aren’t going to draw the line here, then where?
Of course, this won’t sink in with the people who want no boundaries and no thinking — just reaction that somehow goes unquestioned. No legitimate company operates in that fashion, and workers who expect it to probably shouldn’t still be workers.
God forbid they print a photo of the actual rally or report on how people actually feel. Artificially sanitized news is much more appealing.
Thiis kind of cover your ass stupidity is so typical of our times. I mean Jesus Christ! My 10 year-old niece has heard the F word more times than she has hairs on her head and she has a beautiful head of hair. And goes to Catholic school. Such bullshit when a newspaper is “afraid” of offending readers who might see the word fuck. Who gives a Fuck!
Tom:
Sounds like that Catholic school isn’t very good, eh?
Paul, maybe they could, you know, run the pictures of signs that don’t have the word “fuck” in them. Those would probably still tell the story. Funny how that works.
“The right to offend is far more important than the right to not be offended.”
If somebody is angry and frustrated enough to carry a protest sign with the F-word on it, why should we not accurately inform the public about that level of anger and frustration?
The American newspaper business has done quite enough sanitizing of the images we see. No dead bodies at accident scenes; no bloody images from war zones; no “Cheerio-spitter” images of the horrific mutations caused to children by industrial pollution; and, now, no images of “naughty words” that have full and complete protection under the First Amendment, and that are being used to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
If you think the First Amendment protects your right to say “fuck” whenever and wherever you please, then try this. Go to your usual stops and shout that word as loud as you can for as long as you can.
Then report back with the results.
Martin – I have a feeling that if you went to your usual stops and yelled “coffee” as loud as you can for as long as you can, you’d experience the same results. Being obnoxious and saying “fuck” are not mutually exclusive, but they’re also not the same thing.
I can’t believe there are so many people (okay, a handful) who think it’s OK to publish a photo with the f-word in it. When it comes to the First Amendment, it’s important to remember the old adage, “Pick your battles.” This is certainly one not worth fighting.
BTW, it may be instructive to bone up on legal history, specifically the Supreme Court’s (in my view, wrongheaded) 2007 opinion that found a school principal was within her rights to suspend a student who held up a banner reading “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” across the street from the school. Different facts, but still…
Martin Frobisher has it right.
I think the problem is the reaction. If the photo had been filtered out in editing (and assuming there were others of equal news value to use), fine. But to freak out like this, and apologize with such indignity — and to actually stop the presses — well, it’s emblematic of newspaperdom today, where the main aim is to avoid offending anyone, at all costs: An approach that has turned our newspapers into unreadable mush that fewer and fewer people care to pay attention to.
Martin Frobisher offers a transparently false choice: being a schoolmarm on one hand and using “fuck” “whenever and wherever you choose” on the other. How about we act like adults and generally refrain from using it (especially for gratuitous reasons), but also not be afraid to use it on those rare occasions that it’s appropriate, or it happens to be in a newsworthy photo? Or at least not freak the fuck out when it accidentally makes it into the paper?
In general, how about we start applying our natural human judgment to things rather than being constantly buffeted this way and that by our fear that we’re going to “offend” someone? Because it ain’t just cuss words where that problem reveals itself: it’s all over the paper, every day.
DING DING DING we have a winner (Dan Mitchell)