Good Taste and Bad Journalism.

• Author: SALTZMAN, JOE
• Position: Brief Article

JOURNALISTS PROTECT THE PUBLIC from thousands of images and stories that show the horror of the human condition, the daily chronicle of human suffering, the hellish episodes of life. They do so under the umbrella of good taste. Remembrances of these stories may cause many a reporter nightmares and excuses for drugs and drink, but the public is spared the gory details of children who are burned, beaten, and sexually defiled; bloody highway accidents; people mutilated, tortured, and dismembered in battles and street fights; women tortured by rapists; or victims burned beyond recognition. So, it is no wonder that public executions are usually held in private, and that any discussion of televising the event is usually dismissed, again in the interest of good taste and public decency.

The problem is indecent acts and bad taste are all around us. But you wouldn't know it watching the news or reading the newspapers. The news is routinely sanitized by editors and news producers more worried about good taste than good reporting. Profanity, for example, is never reported verbatim. When one highly rated cable network recently put on uncensored interviews with athletes using language common in any locker room (or workplace for that matter), it was frowned upon by stern critics and commentators. Yet, the reluctance to print what people say the way that they say it can distort a news story and cause dangerous misconceptions.

During street demonstrations, for instance, police on the lines are constantly bombarded with profane language. Often, the language, and the obscene images the language evokes, can anger police into committing violent acts against the demonstrators. No one can ever excuse police brutality, yet the failure to report what caused the police action leaves out an important part of the story. The complete story makes a difference in our perception of law enforcement authorities, and it helps explain the unexplainable. Yet, no newspaper will print profanity except in rare instances when it is uttered by a public official, and even then, the editors will resort to the coy and offensive dots and dashes, as if the members of the audience were 10-year-olds not adult enough to sit with their parents.

Any debate about capital punishment makes little sense unless the audience knows what capital punishment looks and sounds like. If the purpose of capital punishment is an eye for an eye, then this Biblical action seems ripe for TV. If the purpose of...