When I arrived for my Sunday evening shift on Oct. 25, 2009, the day editor had picked up a story from the Los Angeles Times slugged “Offensive Twitter.” According to the story, a UCLA football player had tweeted a racial epithet about his coach. Neither our pick-up nor the Times revealed the slur or the respective races of the player and coach.
A basic rule of journalism is to not identify a person’s race — or religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, immigration status and the list goes on — unless it’s germane to the story. The reason is that before the rule, crime stories in particular would often mention the minority status of a suspect, as in, “a black man robbed a liquor store,” and such details can contribute to stereotyping. But in the age of political correctness, sometimes journalists leave out race and other sensitive details even when they are germane. Careful journalists err on the side of vagueness, while I leaned the other way.
One time a reporter turned in a story about a vandal accused of committing a hate crime at a house of worship, but left out the race and religion of the suspect and target, as well as the nature of the epithet. Who hated whom? Was it a burning cross, swastika or desecrated Quran? Careful journalists try to avoid inflaming ethnic frictions, but enquiring minds want to know.
For reasons best left unstated, when I was on the desk, the editor would tend to funnel the more lurid sex crime stories my way. One of my less endearing traits was to call a reporter and ask, “dick or tits?” In response, I’d usually get a reference to the company’s workplace harassment policy. But what I wanted to know was whether the suspect or victim was male or female. For example, in stories about teachers having sex with students, sometimes a reporter wouldn’t reveal dick or tits. Does it make a difference if the teacher is male and the student female, or vice versa? And what if the teacher and student are of the same sex? Is that germane to the story, or is it prurient? We may have one set of emotions about a man having sex with a girl and another about a woman having sex with a boy, and still another about same-sex sex, and some of those feelings may be sexist, homophobic or perverted. Some journalists will provide just the information they think readers need to know. I tried to give them what I thought they wanted to know, which, in cases of teacher-student sex, was dick or tits.
In the story about the football player who’d tweeted a racial epithet, both the Times and our pick-up used an edited version of the player’s tweet: “man oregon, stanford and cal should have been easy wins ,, but [expletive] thys [racial slur] norm chow dnt be trustin us ,, so it is what it is.”
When I read the story, I assumed a white player had called a black coach the n-word, because the n-word was the only slur I could imagine that would trigger a news story (this was before saying “fag” could also get you in the news). But a quick look at the team’s website revealed that the player was not white, but black, and the coach was not black, but Asian/Hawaiian. And when I dug up the original tweet, the player hadn’t used the n-word per se, but a similar word that begins the same way but ends in an “a.” A word that, whether Oprah likes it or not, is sometimes used interchangeably with “chick” or “dude” and can be a term of endearment, not servitude.
Here’s the unexpurgated tweet: “oregon, stanford, and cal should have been easy wins ,, but shyt thys nigga norm chow dnt be trustin us ,, so it is what it is”
This was a classic case of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story. Because the only way the mostly white sports reporters could make the tweet sound incendiary was to omit the race of the tweeter. Otherwise, the story might be viewed as a bunch of white guys trying to shame a black guy for using the n-word — the white man’s revenge.
At that point I could have piled on by looking up more of the player’s tweets and probably found other examples of him using the so-called n-word, or I could have tried to tamp down the fire by revealing the races of the player and coach and explaining the difference between nigga and the n-word. When the Times posted an update on its website, I redid the story by saying a black football player who had called his Asian-American coach a variation of the n-word would not be punished, but that UCLA’s head coach had warned him to be careful with social media. Good tip.
Because of political correctness, what should have been a minor sports story about a frustrated pass receiver venting about a coach had been turned into a gotcha story. Dick or tits? Details matter, sometimes even politically incorrect ones, because when left out, the reader fills them in anyway.