Profane ‘salutes’ and a confusion of public standards

In September 1976, then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was pictured prominently in newspapers across the country playfully and prominently aiming his middle finger toward a group of hecklers during a campaign event.

Rockefeller’s action stirred a mild controversy at the time. Interestingly, the publication of it did not.

The vice president himself, who was not on the ticket for his boss Gerald Ford’s campaign, was not offended by the complaints and reportedly even signed copies of the picture on occasion. Today, I’m intrigued by a confusion of incongruities the incident exposes.

The most prominent of these involves reflection on the differences in public attitudes and reporting of the 1976 “Rockefeller salute” compared with the attitudes and reporting of a similar act Monday by President Donald Trump. The entertainment news agency TMZ obtained film of the president briefly flipping off a heckler berating him as a “pedophile protector” during a tour of a Ford Motor Co. plant in Detroit.

There is a common assumption that social mores are in a state of steady decline. Yet, while Trump’s act, like Rockefeller’s, has received plenty of reactions from what the late Bill Granger called “the tongue-clucking crowd,” few, if any, news outlets have carried still pictures of the president’s “bird,” much less a large image similar to the presentation of the Rockefeller case. Many provide links to the TMZ video on their websites, but even many of those blur the president’s hand so as not to offend potentially sensitive viewers.

At the same time, social media is aswarm with copies of the video and clucking commentary about Trump’s behavior. So, not only is there this discordance in time suggesting that contemporary news media are more sensitive to delicate tastes than they were 50 years ago, there is also this mixed signal within our own time. As traditional media shy from including clear photographs with their reports on the situation, readers and viewers are sometimes gleefully, sometimes disparagingly but mostly prominently sharing them with the world.

Muddying the discussion further — or perhaps advancing it — is a similar but unrelated case this week involving photos of ICE protesters in Minneapolis. During an afternoon news meeting, our editors began considering several pictures of a particular scene, then discarded them when they noticed the images showed several protesters extending their middle finger toward ICE agents.

I have written before about the Daily Herald’s aversion to publishing potentially offensive or disturbing content, whether in pictures or language. But, it is becoming increasingly difficult to know how to measure public sensibilities.

In the aftermath of the Renee Good killing, the mayor of Minneapolis unreservedly used the F-word in public condemnations of ICE. At the Ford Motor plant, President Trump is reported to have clearly mouthed the F-word toward his tormentor — and he received but little blowback when it slipped out months ago during an impromptu statement to the press about Israeli aggression. Elsewhere on today’s Opinion page, columnist Byron York decries growing use of profanity among “progressives” trying to show their toughness — while, it must be said, conveniently ignoring the open, aggressive profanity used by ICE agents toward Good both before and after one of them shot her to death.

Amid all this, I find a muddle of contradictory observations about the state of our society’s moral temperament, both in today’s world and when compared against yesterday’s. Yet, I feel a comforting clarity in the Daily Herald’s approach. There should be, it seems to me, a certain standard of dignity to which public figures, political leaders, responsible commentators and, really, anyone in a public setting — including newspapers — should aspire.

And perhaps ironically in that context, Nelson Rockefeller’s famous, almost good-natured “salute” now seems more of an acknowledgment of that standard than a violation of it.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “To Nudge The World: Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.