Scaramucci’s Vulgar Rant Spurs Newsroom Debate: Asterisks or No Asterisks?<br />“Scaramucci’s words satisfied the first part of that restriction, but editors concluded there wasn’t a compelling reason to use the profanity.”<br />This is not the first time news organizations have struggled with how to present objectionable words uttered by Mr. Trump or his staff.<br />Lemon was wrestling with a thorny problem that was challenging all news organizations: Just hours earlier, The New Yorker had<br />published an interview with Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump’s new communications director, that was a censor’s nightmare.<br />“What makes them newsworthy is not just that it came from such a high source but<br />that such objectionable language was directed at other people in the White House,” said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute for journalism.<br />After the first Republican debate two years ago, Mr. Trump said<br />that Megyn Kelly, then a Fox News host, had “blood coming out of her wherever,” a remark that was widely viewed as referring to her menstrual cycle.<br />“The AP’s rules prohibit use of obscenities, racial epithets or other offensive slurs ‘unless they are part of direct quotations<br />and there is a compelling reason for them,’” an Associated Press reporter wrote in an article about the challenges Mr. Scaramucci’s remarks posed for newsrooms.<br />By SYDNEY EMBERJULY 28, 2017<br />“I can probably say that word, but I just won’t,” the CNN host Don Lemon said on Thursday<br />night, as he tangled with the obscenity-laced quotations that were displayed on screen.
