An Irishman's Diary

Most lines of work involve risk management, occasionally. But as the John Terry court case demonstrates, journalism has the added challenge of asterisk management, which can sometimes be just as difficult.

In general, asterisks are deployed in newspapers to soften the effects of words that, uncensored, might offend a certain class of reader. The trick for journalists is to remove just enough of a rude word to give the appearance of decorum, while leaving no doubt as to what the missing letters are. Thus even the most prudish reader will fill in the gaps and have only his or her own dirty mind to blame for the results.

But the case in London centres on what Terry’s lawyers called the “industrial language” used in football. And it’s an interesting choice of words. Because indirectly, the hearings have exposed journalism’s lack of industry standards in this area.

Among the many variations in asterisk management, strange to say, the Sun’s reports have been the most elliptical. Typical of its coverage was a reported comment from Terry to Anton Ferdinand, viz: “F*** off. F*** off. F****** black ****. F****** knobhead.” We might pause in passing to note the irony that Terry finds himself in court over one of only two words in his outburst that could be printed in full by newspapers. But just as interestingly, meanwhile, for its page one headline, the Sun went with a different quotation – the alleged retort from Ferdinand: “You s*****d your mate’s missus”.

The asterisks here may have puzzled even the most dirty-minded readers. Some crossword and Scrabble enthusiasts were probably working through the various possible seven-letter past participles (“shocked . . . sheared . . . stroked . . .?”) before they reached the second paragraph of the story, where the word “shagged” was spelt out in full.

It was spelt out in most newspapers, in fact, this one included. So presumably, the Sun’s asterisk rules relate to the size of the font. As with carpet maintenance, the deeper the “shag”, the more care required.

Compared with the Sun, most newspapers felt the need to give readers more of a hint as to what the four-letter term used by Terry was. Many went with a three-asterisk “c***”. But perhaps controversially, The Irish Times opted for the two-star “c**t”. This was presumably to eliminate any possible confusion, although a few of our more innocent readers may even now be wondering why Terry was calling Ferdinand a “Celt”.

Except during national emergencies – Roy Keane and Saipan, for example – this newspaper has a three-asterisk per rude word limit: hence the various “f***king” references yesterday. But curiously, like every paper I have seen, we also saw fit to print the word “knobhead” in full.

Either this is another lamentable example of the coarsening of society. Or, as I suspect, it was because we weren’t sure how many asterisks to use in “knobhead” or where to put them. “K*******” would be too vague: some confused readers might think it was a kettle reference (in which the kettle was calling the pot “a black c***”). And by my calculation, you’d need at least four asterisks – one more than allowed – to balance decorum with clarity.

THERE ARE many people, I know, who find even limited asterisk use by the mainstream media patronising. But the irony is that the age of instantaneous communication is only adding to this sort of thing. You think newspapers are nannyish? Try talking (dirty) to your company spam filter.

Depending on how aggressively programmed it is, it may not even confine itself to censoring rude words. Rude strings of letters lurking within larger words may also be also arrested for indecency: “Assassin”, for example (maybe not the best example of an innocent e-mail word), or “manuscript”.

For similar reasons, search engines and internet forums have been a mixed blessing for people from the English town of Scunthorpe. Arsenal fans have suffered too. And then you have special cases like London’s Horniman Museum, which hosts a very serious collection of natural history and anthropology, but try telling that to spam filters.

We all occasionally have to contact our IT departments to vouch for the bona fides of an e-mail which has been detained on suspicion of rude content. But I think of a former Irish Times columnist, Claud Cockburn, who – perhaps mercifully – died before the internet age. Were he alive today, the silence of some of his consonants notwithstanding, would any of his e-mails get through? At least with newspapers, it’s still human beings who filter the language. On which note, the latest row over an Irish Olympic equestrian team, yesterday, reminded me of a press conference I once covered involving the then MEP and equine enthusiast Avril Doyle. She was commenting on the expense our Olympic show-jumpers faced and their need for more government funding.

But so doing, she used an equestrian verb that provoked much sniggering among non-equestrian journalists. And writing the story later, I did think about using asterisks in the word to protect the impressionable. In the end, however, I decided to trust our readers’ maturity, knowing that most of them would understand exactly what Avril meant when she urged the Government to “mount our athletes” now.