The editor of a student paper has been allowed to keep his job after the furore surrounding a headline on an editorial he wrote.
David McSwane the editor of the Colorado State University paper, The Daily Collegian, was censured by the Board of Student Communications, but was not sacked, as had been expected.
McSwane wrote an editorial in response to the tasering of a student at a Florida university. He headlined the piece “Taser this: FUCK Bush“.
Many publications commenting and reporting this story have been coy about using the “expletive”, but fuck it: it’s a perfectly servicable word.
Congratulations David on keeping your job.
David McSwane wins right to stay in editor’s job
October 8, 2007Fuck Bush – not in this town!
October 3, 2007Student paper headline ignites US free speech row | Press&publishing | MediaGuardian.co.uk
The editor of a student newspaper at Colorado State University is facing disciplinary charges at his university for publishing an edition of the Rocky Mountain Collegian with a front page banner headline that read: “Fuck Bush”.
The case has become a test of the First Amendment right to free speech and the incident caused advertisers to pull material (and money from the paper). Here’s a piece of the action from Editor & Publisher:
Student officials and faculty adviser Jeff Browne told the CSU board that since the editorial ran, 18 advertisers have either called to pull their advertising or threatened to end their advertising in the newspaper, which could result in some $50,000 in potential lost revenue. Officials have said that staff would have to take an across-the-board 10 percent pay cut to make up for the losses, which cut into the $950,000 advertising budget. Browne said some staff members, including a photographer, have quit.
The newspaper maintains an office on school grounds but is self-funded through advertising.
In a written statement submitted to the board, McSwane said: “We’ve lost advertising dollars. While this is a blow to our organization, I would also encourage the Board to remember that advertising dollars, though crucial, should not control editorial content.”
School policies governing student media state that students cannot publish obscene materials but that “indecent or vulgar language is not obscene.” Landers noted that the same policy prohibits the use of obscene and vulgar language in editorials.
Personally, I think 20-year-old David McSwane is a hero. But in the blogosphere, he has friends, supporters, and enemies; in particular college Republicans.
I think it’s amusing that so many Republican bloggers can get upset about one little word – a “profanity” to use their colloquial term for the word FUCK, but they can still share the love with that asshole of a president and his filthy rich chums from the Blackwater security company who are paid a billion dollars a year to terrorise and murder Iraqis.
However, it’s not the first time that David McSwane’s journalistic antics have got him into trouble, or rather, into the national headlines.
He scammed a great story for his high school newspaper in 2005 that led to several US army recruiters being stood down in after a sting operation involving McSwane’s younger brother, a video camcorder and drug paraphenalia.
Here’s more on that story from Editor & Publisher
By Graham Webster
Published: July 25, 2005 4:23 PM ET
NEW YORK David McSwane had seen the military recruiters around town. He had seen them at the high school. And he knew that with recruitment rates down due to the Iraq war, they were working hard to attract new cadets. And it gave him an idea.“I wanted to see how far they’d go to get another soldier,” says McSwane, a reporter for the Westwind at Arvada West High School in Arvada, Colo. So he set up a sting investigation, posing as a high school dropout with a marijuana habit and went down to his local Colorado Army recruitment station to enlist.
McSwane, 17, knew he would have to document his conversations with the recruiters, so he taped the telephone conversations, enlisted his sister to pose as a proud sibling so she could photograph parts of the process, and asked a friend to operate a video camera across from a local head shop.
But how did McSwane get an recruiter to visit a head shop with him? Simple. The honor student, pretending to have a ganja habit he couldn’t kick, went there to score a detoxifying kit the Army office claimed had helped two previous recruits pass drug tests, according to a taped phone conversation broadcast on local TV. McSwane told his recruiter he didn’t know what the detox formula looked like, so the man agreed to go to the store with him.
I like this guy’s style and nerve. If I had a student like David McSwayne in my journalism class, he’d have my support. So David, if you get kicked out of college, come down to Auckland, I’ll find room for you here.’
Just to finish, the profanity in question is defined thus in the online dictionary, dictionary.com
fuck



1. | to have sexual intercourse with. |
2. | Slang. to treat unfairly or harshly. |
–verb (used without object)
3. | to have sexual intercourse. |
4. | Slang. to meddle (usually fol. by around or with). |
–interjection
5. | Slang. (used to express anger, disgust, peremptory rejection, etc., often fol. by a pronoun, as you or it.) |
–noun
6. | an act of sexual intercourse. |
7. | a partner in sexual intercourse. |
8. | Slang. a person, esp. one who is annoying or contemptible. |
9. | the fuck, Slang. (used as an intensifier, esp. with WH-questions, to express annoyance, impatience, etc.) |
—Verb phrases
10. | fuck around, Slang.
|
11. | fuck off, Slang.
|
12. | fuck up, Slang.
|
—Idiom
13. | give a fuck, Slang. to care; be concerned. |

—Related forms
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006. |
American Heritage Dictionary – Cite This Source – Share This
fuck ![]() ![]() v. fucked, fuck·ing, fucks v. tr.
v. intr.
n.
interj. Used to express extreme displeasure.
fuck over
|
(Download Now or Buy the Book)
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
Online Etymology Dictionary – Cite This Source – Share This
fuck
Non sunt in celi
quia fuccant uuiuys of heli
“They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely.” Fuccant is pseudo-L., and in the original it is written in cipher. The earliest examples of the word otherwise are from Scottish, which suggests a Scandinavian origin, perhaps from a word akin to Norw. dial. fukka “copulate,” or Swedish dial. focka “copulate, strike, push,” and fock “penis.” Another theory traces it to M.E. fkye, fike “move restlessly, fidget,” which also meant “dally, flirt,” and probably is from a general North Sea Gmc. word, cf. M.Du. fokken, Ger. ficken “fuck,” earlier “make quick movements to and fro, flick,” still earlier “itch, scratch;” the vulgar sense attested from 16c. This would parallel in sense the usual M.E. slang term for “have sexual intercourse,” swive, from O.E. swifan “to move lightly over, sweep” (see swivel). Chronology and phonology rule out Shipley’s attempt to derive it from M.E. firk “to press hard, beat.” As a noun, it dates from 1680. French foutre and Italian fottere look like the Eng. word but are unrelated, derived rather from L. futuere, which is perhaps from PIE base *bhau(t)- “knock, strike off,” extended via a figurative use “from the sexual application of violent action” [Shipley; cf. the sexual slang use of bang, etc.]. Popular and Internet derivations from acronyms (and the “pluck yew” fable) are merely ingenious trifling. The O.E. word was hæman, from ham “dwelling, home,” with a sense of “take home, co-habit.” Fuck was outlawed in print in England (by the Obscene Publications Act, 1857) and the U.S. (by the Comstock Act, 1873). The word may have been shunned in print, but it continued in conversation, especially among soldiers during WWI.
“It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word. Thus if a sergeant sai
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper |
WordNet – Cite This Source – Share This
fuck | |
noun | |
1. | slang for sexual intercourse |
verb | |
1. | have sexual intercourse with; “This student sleeps with everyone in her dorm”; “Adam knew Eve”; “Were you ever intimate with this man?” [syn: sleep together] |
WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.
Some student views on ethical fault lines
May 4, 2007Te Waha Nui Online – AUT
My colleague, Associate Professor David Robie, has posted some interesting student work on ethical dilemmas on the Te Waha Nui website.The commentaries are from an assignment set in the AUT journalism paper Public Affairs Reporting.
Students have tackled some interesting topics:
Congratulations to Spike, Sarah G, Charlotte, Pricscilla, Eleanor, Todd and Sarah L.
It’s good to see that journalism students don’t lose their sense of ethics and their idealism when confronted with some of the less seemly aspects of their chosen profession. Let’s hope that as the new generation comes into its own in the newsrooms of the future that these lessons are not forgotten.