What the f#@$!: Policing and Performing the Unmentionable in the News

Abstract

This paper examines the multimodal (typographic and linguistic) tactics used by journalists and their editors to represent taboo language. Focusing on shit and fuck and two high-profile uses of these words, our analysis examines the top-down strategies and regulatory practices of official style guides, and draws on a content analysis of the bottom-up practices of journalists/editors in a corpus of nearly 300 news articles. We demonstrate the tension that emerges in this mediatizing of taboo between a bourgeois desire for 'civil discourse' and the media's self-declared commitment to reporting the facts, the truth. Compounded in the USA by the constitutional protection of so called free speech, this tension is primarily resolved through a playful-prurient performance of omission. We frame this discursive process in three ways: containment games (i.e. appearing to avoid or distancing oneself from the taboo), elitist disavowal (i.e. positioning oneself as superior by ascribing the taboo elsewhere), and symbolic violence (i.e. effectively regulating speakers and maintaining hegemonic order). Ultimately, what see here is a community of language workers at work and at play: simultaneously crafting and policing language while also demonstrating their mastery and artistry as wordsmiths. Far from reporting the facts, journalists are busy making (up) the news.