Blunt Barry speaks out

Sen. Barry Goldwater recommended Judge Sandra O’Connor for the Supreme Court and was unamused when the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Moral Majority criticized her as not far enough right. With the blunt language of the Southwest, Goldwater growled, “Every good Christian ought to kick Jerry Falwell right in the ass.” That caused a bit of heartburn in the news business because Goldwater’s little word is listed as vulgar in the dictionary. Even so, three TV networks and many ;newspapers quoted Goldwater verbatim. The Christian Science Monitor, with its usual firmness, reported that Goldwater had said something “not printable in this newspaper.” The New York Times faced a dilemma: It wanted to run the story but it had to protect its genteel audience from a rude word. The Times could have written, “right in the a-” It used this dodge when President Carter threatened to whip Ted Kennedy’s a–. Or it could have slipped into indirect quotation, saying that Goldwater urged the faithful to chastise Falwell in the seat, rear or duff. Instead the Times wrote, “Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell in the posterior.” Now this may seem a minor fudge but it isn’t. Every journalism student learns to put within direct quotes only what a person actually said. Worse yet, the Times is reputed to be the nation’s newspaper of record and is much consulted by librarians, historians and other dusty types. Someday one of them will come across the bowdlerized quotation and write a book proving that Goldwater