War on Words: PC Cops and the Newspaper Copy Desk

Copy editors are, in my humble opinion, the late-night heroes of journalism. 

Under the duress of daily newsroom deadlines, they provide a critical, last-ditch factual and stylistic backstop to save unsuspecting reporters like myself from embarrassing corrections, or perhaps something even worse.

And those stylish headlines!

As a college journalist, I once wrote a first-person piece about a weekend escapade in which me and my best friend hitchhiked from Buffalo to Toronto at 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

We got picked up by two drunk Canadians who had been partying late in Buffalo, but as soon as we crossed the Peace Bridge, they realized they didn't have enough gas to get back to Toronto.

So we turned around, only to be stopped and strip-searched at the U.S. border, my friend and I clueless as to whether these strangers in the car were killers or drug runners with international warrants.

I still remember the headline for its cool rock 'n' roll vibe.

"Back in the USA, you don't know how lucky you are boys."

Years later, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve gotten calls at home from some dedicated copy editor who politely suggested that I’ve made some very-correctable mistake.

Because he’s done the math, you see, and, at 95, the protagonist in my story could not have possibly been a veteran of World War I, as my story says.

Could it be that I meant World War II?

These calls are made without the slightest hint of judgment, just a cheery yet relentless pursuit of accuracy and the truth. 

Sometimes, my blunders have been startling: The group I quoted was actually the American Proctologist’s Association, a copy editor might point out, not Rear-Enders R Us, as I had asserted.

Or the lead character in my story does not, in fact, spell his name Jeffrey Smith, as I wrote, but actually Geoffrey Smythe.

Oops.

“Of course, you’re right,” I’ll say, promising myself to send him two cards at Christmas.

You will no doubt find errors on this post, maddening little missing commas or hyphens where they shouldn't be, because I do not have a copy editor to save me. How I miss that good-natured backstop!

But all of that said, I’ve got to get this off my chest.

Along with the good ones, those dedicated accuracy soldiers and underpaid wordsmiths, are a breed of self-appointed high-priests-of-the-written-word who have guzzled the Kool-Aid of political correctness. 

Most have decided that they — and they alone — can protect the integrity of the following day’s newspaper from any assaults on acceptable language or unsanctioned and ill-advised turns-of-phrase.

An old friend and former newsroom colleague has a phrase for this particular tribe:

Comma-squirters and copy-muggers.

For those uninitiated to the way newspapers work, a brief explainer: Reporters like me work for assignment editors. They’re your co-pilots on any story and see the reporting and writing through from beginning to end.

When they’re done, the piece goes to a bank of copy editors, whose job is to review the story for style and grammar.

But some take it upon themselves to go a step further — a step too far, in my opinion.

How do I fear and loathe their often-odious decision making?

Oh, let me count the ways.

Like the old copy-editor cowboy in Kansas City who lassoed one of my cop stories. 

I’d done a profile of the mean streets of East Kansas City and talked to patrolmen about denizens they dismissed for their uncouth and unlawful ways.

The coppers called them “BEMS,” or Booger Eating Morons.

It was raw, perhaps, but it was real, the way cops talked among themselves and I thought it said something about the men in blue and the stress of their work.

Well, this copy editor stood up, hitched up his pants and declared, “Not in any newspaper I work for.”

Then he cut the line, just like that, no questions asked, no appeals allowed.

Judge, jury and executioner.

Some of these editors are like the censorious Catholic nuns who tormented me in grade school. While even network television allows words like “damn” or the occasional “bastard” to pass the dreaded censors, these self-appointed guardians of the language will not allow such blasphemy, even in a quote, to appear in print.

It’s like it’s still 1955 and these people are utterly terrified that someone — anyone — will be, God forbid, offended. Maybe the newspaper will be picketed by the vicious, take-no-prisoners “Mothers Against Swear Words.”

Honestly, what on the good Lord’s green earth are these people afraid of? 

Obviously, they’ve all taken a secret oath, written in blood: While the rest of the culture goes right into the sewer, they’re not going to stand for such a degradation of the Bard’s language to sneak into the newspaper, god-dammit, not on their watch.

Sometimes, it’s not even profanity, just a word that makes them, ahem, uncomfortable. 

Not everybody, mind you, just them.

“Can we say this,” they’ll ask.

“Um, yes we can. In fact, we just did.”

One editor questioned a quote by a retired U.S. Senator from Wyoming, who told a lunchtime companion, “Now stop farting around with that camera; I’m telling a story!”

OMG! We can’t use the word fart. It’s too close to “shit.” 

You can’t fool me. I can smell an offensive word a mile off.

The word “broad” has reared its ugly head in stories not just once, but twice.

The first time, in 1995, I wrote a profile of a homeless pianist who played like an angel each time he shuffled into a barber shop in North Hollywood. Russ Turner was once a well-regarded studio musician before falling prey to the bottle.

One morning, as Russ tuned up the old piano, he turned to me and winked. “This piano’s like an old broad. You take care of her and she’ll take care of you.”

Back in the newsroom, some editor apparently smelled a rat.

Hold the presses! He then walked around the newsroom, asking women reporters if they were offended by the word, until he apparently found one who said, “Well, I think I’m offended.”

For him, that was more than enough. 

The quote got axed.

Twenty-five years later, nothing had changed.

I wrote a story about a disabled man in his early 60s who became a radio deejay in rural Nevada. He called himself Mr. Cool. And then he died, leaving an odd, colorful mark on the town. A character in the piece described the man’s mother, a small-town barfly, as a “broad.”

“Can we say this,” a copy editor asked.

People might, gulp, object.

Maybe we’re going too far, too fast.

I figured it too would be gone in sixty seconds. The editors couldn’t tell me right up to deadline whether the damned word was in the story or not.

The list goes on.

I once wrote a story about workers who commuted by passenger train each day from San Diego to Los Angeles. Along the way, the regulars got to know each other and the Friday night bar car, as you might guess, was loud and lively.

I met a father-and-son duo who knew people all along the line, at every stop. “Like suburban sailors, they knew someone at every port of call.”

Nope, said the copy-editor. 

Too suggestive, perhaps.

The line was changed.

“Like traveling neighbors, they knew just about everybody.”

WTF? 

Traveling effin’ neighbors? 

I’ll bet that copy editor slept better that night, knowing that innocent readers were spared such a linguistic crime.

Another time I profiled a woman from Taiwan who threw Saturday night matchmaker parties at a bar in Burbank. Most of her female clients happened to be Asian, recent immigrants who spoke halting English, and the men were usually Caucasian, but not exclusively.

It made for some awkward cultural moments. 

My description of one party, looking back, was far from perfect, but it captured the weirdness of the scene, which I described, as I recall, as “a high school dance on acid; the women huddled mutely at tables as the men circled like predators, like Vietnam veterans who couldn’t get Saigon out of their mind.”

My assignment editor let the line go, as did the copy desk of another edition of the newspaper, but it was summarily ambushed on the copy desk in my edition.

The editor in question didn’t even bother to call me at home for a polite discussion.

She just whacked it like a weed.

When I inquired the following day, she said, “I don’t know, I was just sort of, you know, offended. I asked other people on the copy desk, and they were offended too.”

The Star Chamber had spoken. 

Once, I covered a trial involving a bunch of rednecks in the San Francisco East Bay who murdered a pre-op transsexual teenager when they discovered she wasn’t actually a girl after all, as they’d assumed.

I filed a story that referred to the victim in the second and subsequent references as “she.” A copy editor sent me an email: He was changing the references to “he” because the victim was born male.

I protested.

People have every right, especially in death, to be identified as they wished, as they saw themselves in life.

What gave him the right to decide?

He let it slide.

I might kvetch, but I’ve never raised my voice with a copy-editor, even the fussiest ones. Despite an onerous call now and then, I still have too much respect for what they do.

In fact, I have even defended them.

A few years back, I wrote a profile of a crusty old retired sheriff in Clark County, Nevada, whose life was the basis for a network TV show. He was colorful and somewhat wacky and he spoke with a gravelly Marlboro-man hoarseness.

His name was Ralph Lamb, and I loved him.

Well, in telling the back story of how Sheriff Lamb went from being a wildly-popular elected official one year to being voted out of office the next, I used the following phrase as a transition.

“But cracks appeared in his public persona.”

The next morning, my email oozed vitriol from readers telling me what a jerk I was. Then I saw, to my horror, that the transition phrase I’d written had mistakenly been edited to read: “Butt cracks appeared in his public persona.”

As it turned out, the editing system had automatically changed “but” to “butt.”

And the world just wasn’t the same.

My cellphone rang nonstop, with urgent calls from the local weekly to a TV reporter.

The horrors! The city’s newspaper-of-record had used the term ‘Butt Cracks!”

With every caller, I backed up my colleague on the copy desk.

It has been a simple software mistake, nothing more. 

Not a revolution.

Copy editors had saved my ass on countless stories, I said. 

So this was nothing. Mistakes happen.

Later, I called Sheriff Lamb to let him know there’d been a minor mistake in the story.

“Well, hell John, I thought you meant that line,” he said. “I kinda liked it.”

And I told him, “Sheriff, if you’re happy, then so am I.”

The copy desk chief later sent me a coffee mug to thank me for defending his staff.

No drama, I insisted.

Heroes of the newsroom, copy editors are.

In the end, the piece about the developmentally disabled Nevada deejay run.

And to my surprise, the word “broad” stayed.

And just when I felt inclined to hitch up my pants and declare a minor moral victory, I read the headline.

And it floored me with its haiku beauty.

“The Eccentric Legacy of Mr. Cool.”

And I decided that all (or most) is forgiven.