After struggling to deal with Donald Trump’s use of the word “schlonged” in December, news outlets seem to have become more comfortable covering the increasingly racy language that has emerged from the Republican side of the 2016 campaign.
It was just three months ago that reporters were struggling to avoid explicitly quoting the party’s front-runner, Donald Trump, who had said at a campaign rally that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was “schlonged” by President Obama in 2008.
But after Trump and one of his rivals, Marco Rubio, have made obvious references in recent days to the size of Trump’s penis, the horse appears to have left the barn.
“Donald Trump defends size of his penis,” blared a headline at CNN.com last week.
A Politico story said, “Donald Trump assured the nation Thursday night that his hands aren’t small [and] that there’s no trouble with another part of his anatomy.”
Trump’s remark came in response to attacks from Rubio, who had made jokes at previous rallies, correlating the size of Trump’s “small” hands to the size of his penis. “[H]e referred to my hands — ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem,” Trump said at the debate.
The Washington Post captured the moment as, “Presidential front-runner Donald Trump just assured us all that he’s well-endowed.”
February was a particularly risqué month on the trail. At a dinner on Feb. 26, the Associated Press quoted former GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham as saying that Trump’s popularity proves, “My party has gone batshit crazy.”
The report, uncensored, was re-published by the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Earlier in the month, Trump, during a campaign rally in New Hampshire, repeated a woman in the audience who shouted out that GOP candidate Ted Cruz is “a pussy.”
The Washington Post included the word in its headline recounting the incident. The New York Times used the word in its story but only referred to it as a “slur” in the headline. Both cable and network news, for the most part, however, censored those words.
Tom Kent, standards editor for the Associated Press, published a blog post Monday explaining how the wire service determines when “vulgarity” is appropriately included without censorship in a report.
“We use vulgar and obscene quotations only when we feel they’re essential to telling a story,” Kent wrote. “Our point here isn’t that ‘pussy’ or ‘batshit’ was absolutely right or wrong to use. Opinions will vary, including among AP staffers. The most important thing is for us to discuss how important such language is to a story, before the story goes out.”
