Why you had to go elsewhere for Noah’s quote

Now that the topic of personal slurs has died down, I’d like to stir up that hornet’s nest again.

Actually, the topic is closer to how we handle racial and cultural slurs that become the focus of news stories. The Daily Herald has long taken the position that we serve no useful purpose, and, in fact, might exacerbate an already volatile situation by publishing said slurs. Furthermore, to publish exactly what was said, we’d often violate our own very exacting guidelines on not publishing even the mildest of swears, which is why you often see our columnists in the rough-and-tumble world of sports using the words “heck” and ”darn.”

Slurs became front-page news when we came across the forfeit by the St. Charles East soccer team after their fans had hurled racial epithets at the mostly Hispanic Larkin High School team. That was followed last week by the hubbub over two Wheaton Warrenville South students dropping N-bombs and other taunts at two black players on the Naperville North lacrosse team. Hovering over all this was the national furor of Bulls center Joakim Noah yelling an obscenity/gay slur combo at a heckling fan.

Not long afterward came a letter to the editor, chastising us for not printing Noah’s specific slur. “I would like the Daily Herald to tell us exactly what Noah uttered so that we ourselves can evaluate the moral aspects of it and determine whether the $50,000 fine was justified,” it read. “Why on earth does the Daily Herald keep these news details from us?”

After conferring with Jim Slusher, assistant managing editor/opinion and the guy in charge of our editorial page, we decided not to run the letter. Our reasoning was twofold:

1. Jim put it well. “My response to (the writer’s) line of reasoning, ‘Come on. You’ve got to be kidding.’ He knows we don’t print ‘(insert Noah swear here).’ He knows we don’t print a host of slurs for gays, blacks, Hispanics, Italians, Scots, Irishmen, people with special needs and God knows what other group people find cause to insult with a nasty diminutive term.” In short, the writer was just being more annoying than constructive.

2. Of far greater importance, such detail is not what our readers expect from us. Yes, this can be a nasty business and some pretty gritty stories appear in the folds of this newspaper. But we still can apply some age-old standards of decency, and make it a product that can be shown in the schools, that parents can read to their children. Heck, we received a letter that took me to task because I had “lauded” profanity in an earlier column. (A funny thing happened in the writing of this column: The aforementioned letter was regarding a candid memo we’d inadvertently obtained from the Naperville Central High School principal, who expressed his unhappiness on the volume of seniors who ditched classes by saying, “@#*@#!” I went looking for the letter in our archives to show how I had magnanimously published it — only to discover I had lost track of it, and it never got into print. Now if I were you, I’d start to smell a DuPage editor rat, but, honestly, that’s what happened. I feel so badly about this, I vow to run the letter in Saturday’s editions.)

But I digress. The point is that if a person can be offended enough by those tick-tack-toe signs and other symbols substituting for profanity, can you imagine the furor if we started publishing such stuff? I’ll admit it: I was curious to know exactly what Noah said. Took me all of two minutes of painstaking online research. I suspect our writer who accused us of conspiring to hold back the details knew that, too.

So, yeah, they’re available; just not in the Daily Herald. And I’m just fine with that. I bet most of our readers are, too.

jdavis@dailyherald.com