October 10, 2005--#x@%&~x%^!!!

I grew up thinking of the NY Times as the Newspaper of Record. Even during the 1950s when the printers union shut the presses for weeks, when the Times returned they included a supplement in which they presented summaries of the major events that occurred while they were not publishing. Loud and clear, they were making a statement—"We are the paper of historical record; we keep reporting and writing even when the unions are on strike."

So when I saw the piece in the Times the other day about the women who was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight because the T-shirt she was wearing included an obscene word, in the spirit of investigative reporting, I forced myself to keep on reading.

There was more to the story than just “the word”—the T-shirt also included pictures of President Bush and Vice President Chaney. This was clearly taking shape as a free speech story. The wearer, Lorrie Heasley, was on a flight from Reno to Portland to visit her parents who are Democrats and she wanted them to see the shirt. Ms. Heasley reported that she thought the shirt was “hilarious.” “I have cousins in Iraq and other relatives going to war. Here we are trying to free another country and I have to get off an airplane over a T-shirt.” As you might imagine the A.C.L.U. is now involved.

Freedom of Speech issues aside, I must confess that I was equally interested in “the word.” I came to the bottom of the column and felt a little betrayed by my Newspaper of Record. Not only didn’t they include the obscene phrase they didn’t even allude to it in a way that would enable me to figure it out.

I know the Times is a G-Rated paper (maybe that’s one of the reasons it is losing readership), but if we are dealing here with Free Speech, at least give me a clue! I was left only with my perverse imagination. I ran through the list of George Carlins’ famous Seven Words and had quite a bit of fun. But for the Historical Record, the NY Times betrayed me.

Actually, it turns out there was an easy solution for the Times, if they really took their role seriously and wanted to avoid unleashing the prurient imaginations of people like me. CNN on its website figured it out. They reported the same story and mentioned that, in addition to the picture of our Leaders, the phrase on the shirt was a pun on the title of a recent popular movie—Meet the Fockers. Get it?? Bush and Chaney-- “Meet the F_ _ _ers.” (Forgive me for the blanks but this blog is also G-Rated—my 97-year old mother reads it!).

Glad I could clear that up for you. But how sad and disillusioned I now feel with my more nuanced understanding of what the Times means when it says that it is about "All the News That’s Fit to Print". Of course, as with so much else, it depends on what your definition of “fit” is.