Unclutch the fucking pearls

Make room on the fainting couch for the Wall Street Journal, covering -- what's that headline again? -- "The Profane 78-Year-Old Leading the Dockworkers Strike":

“We’re going to show these greedy bastards you can’t survive without us!” Daggett shouted to cheers from the crowd in a speech filled with profanities and warnings about the threats automation poses to workers.

... Daggett, who has the broad shoulders of a former dockworker and a raspy voice that comes from years of shouting at labor rallies, is now throwing himself behind an effort to win a historic increase in pay and an effort to get dockworkers around the world behind his goal of halting automation in its tracks and establishing longshore labor as a formidable partner in global trade.

“People are going to sit up and realize how important longshoremen jobs are,” Daggett said in an interview at the rally. “They won’t be able to sell cars. They won’t be able to stock malls. They won’t be able to do anything in this country without my f—ing people. And it’s about time they start realizing it.”

Personal prescriptive peeve* here. Neither "bastards" nor "fucking" is "profane." Different poles on a scale of naughty-to-FCC v Pacifica, maybe, but neither stands in opposition to, or rudely invokes, the sacred.** But the cooler point is the subset of framing that we can think of as policing: whom the press needs to keep an eye on because, well, we're just never sure they can be trusted.

Mind you, this is the Wall Street Journal, the site in which A.J. Liebling first observed that "the employer, in strike stories, always 'offers' and the union always 'demands.'" True to form, both cases of offering belong to "port employers and ocean shipping companies," and all the demanding is done by the profane old man delivering his "battle cry." The Journal overall maintains a strong firewall between the church of the editorial page and the state of the news pages, but that's the fun of framing analysis: it illuminates how the routines of news can make the wall transparent, no matter how vigilant the guards.

The agenda-setting cousins will remind you that a single article isn't going to change your attitude about labor in general or Harold Daggett in particular. That's not what news does. What it does is affect the balance of what you learn: not just the ones and zeroes of the day's events (Tigers 5, Astros 2) but whether you're in the sort of zip code where that's good news or bad news.
 

Daniel Hallin explains this as a set of spheres in which news operates. Objectivity does its work in the "sphere of legitimate controversy," where "neutrality and balance are the prime journalistic virtues": whether it's about firing the football coach or adding an ad valorem tax for library expansion, both sides are aired out for the public to see. In the "sphere of consensus," journalists act as "ceremonial protectors of consensus values"; both sides don't need an airing, because there is no legitimate other side to TIGERS WIN!!!!*** In the third sphere, we're patrolling the bounds of the legitimate. That doesn't mean you're ruled out of the news if you'r eoutside the norm, but it does mean you and your views are going to go through the special security line, and it's going to show -- in whether and how you're marked for saying "fuck," for example.

Up at the top is a lead story from the Fox nomepage in Jan. 17; it's one of three unique stories from the top of the page between July 2023 and February 2024 with the "Potty Mouth POTUS" hed. Here's the lede:

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that President Biden does not insult voters, but he has made insulting remarks to them on several occasions.

Now, to be fair, in this example, Biden had merely called a voter a "horse's ass" back in 2020. But barely two weeks later (same headline), it emerged -- meaning Fox read an article at Politico -- that Biden, in speaking with "close allies and aides," had apparently referred to that Trump fellow as a "sick f---" and a "f---ing a--hole." 

Fox's orthography is standard for the US press. The British are different, and the Guardian's let-the-fucks-fall-where-they-may attitude is a real outlier (here's a summary, and if you haven't seen it before, enjoy the stylebook cartoon). But the boundary work is clear when Fox (again thanks to Politico) quotes the Trump campaign:

"It’s a shame that Crooked Joe Biden disrespects the presidency both publicly and privately," senior Trump campaign adviser Chris Lacivita told Politico.

No such opprobrium attaches to Trump's own campaign language, whether he's saying "bullshit" or merely slinging loads of it at lawful immigrants in Ohio. Trump is in a category that, at least at Fox, doesn't need policing. Like a Tom Brady or a Bill Belichick or a Kevin Costner, he can go about his business. Your Taylor Swifts and your Travis Kelces (not to mention your Kamala Harrises and your Tim Walzes), on the other hand, need constant watching. It's certainly not Fox's fault when some of that social media monitoring is done by the influencers who were surprised to find that their newly enlarged paychecks were partly funded by the Kremlin, but there we are.

None of this is to suggest that the Wall Street Journal is enjoying Moscow's largesse. It does suggest that, no matter how high the barbed wire on the church-state wall, there's a clue to the secret passages in who is marked as profane and who isn't.

* Everybody has some
** Unlike, say, Blake's "God damn the king"
*** Though it's dicey when the Houston starter graduated from Wayne State, which is two miles up Woodward from Comerica Park.