Time was, reporters and editors would routinely clean up grammar and delete cuss words when quoting government officials or anyone else. This was partly out of respect for political office and partly to improve communication.
But when a government official repeatedly mocks, criticizes and otherwise attacks the news media and working reporters as "the enemy of the people," deliberately antagonizing those whose job it is to keep the public informed of both good and bad news, rather than blindly supporting said government official in spreading propaganda, there comes a time when reporters and editors stop cleaning up the grammar and deleting the cuss words.
Besides, they can't do it when the politician regularly and repeatedly spouts foul language on live national television broadcasts even as he bad-mouths the media.
So if he doesn't care about using cuss words in public, why should we? say the reporters. Journalism's job is to describe and report what politicians do and say, even and especially when what the politician says is false and provably false.
That's called lying.
And it's even more important to the survival of a free society that a lying leader be exposed as just that -- a lying, foul-mouthed, incompetent fraud.
Reporters around the world have paid the ultimate price for exposing a high official's misdeeds and lies.
We now see examples of threats made against those who criticize the current president. These threats are made via social media -- usually Twitter and often by the president himself -- unedited and unfiltered by anyone, just as he has publicly urged that protestors at political rallies be beaten up, promising that he would pay the bail for those who beat up the protestors.
The pen remains mightier than the sword, but it's hard to wield a pencil when your fingers are broken.
Fortunately, we haven't come to that stage in America.
Yet.
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