Word: tastelessness
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Personalities always cause debate, and in 1983 former Secretary of the Interior James Watt, ex-National Security Adviser (and Watt's replacement at the Department of Interior) William Clark and Comedian Joan Rivers ("tasteless and cruel") drew the public's ire. Yet readers rose to defend celebrities they deemed badly treated-such as the late anchorwoman Jessica Savitch and Elizabeth Taylor ("Why do journalists feel compelled to constantly snipe at Elizabeth Taylor's weight?" chided...
...have never seen any group so bitter and hostile as the television newscasters who were denied the right, which they consider constitutional and God-given, to cover the Grenada invasion. These are the same individuals who trampled the rights and privacy of others by engaging in the unbelievably tasteless pursuit of families awaiting news of loved ones in the Beirut suicide bombing. The press serves a valuable function, but it has built too lofty a pedestal on which to display...
...perhaps the most tasteless single snippet of this deathwatch footage, a CBS News crew taped the actual moment when Marine officials arrived to report to his family that Corporal Timothy Giblin of North Providence, R.I., had been killed. First shown on the CBS Morning News, the sequence was replayed that evening on, among others, the CBS-owned station in Chicago. As the tape finished, Anchor Jacobson apologized: "I am sorry, that film should not have been shown. It was inappropriate." NBC chose not to air similar footage its crew shot at a Marine's home in California. Said Anchor...
...fail to see any justification for your tasteless photograph of the body of one of my fallen comrades, the helicopter pilot lying dead on the beach...
...days after Watt's remark, in a bizarre protest demonstration in his defense, a man on crutches supported the usage, citing other contexts where "cripple" is benign. True enough. Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz forced himself out of the Ford Administration by telling a cruel and tasteless joke about "coloreds"; yet Dick Gregory could title his autobiography Nigger, and Flip Wilson won love and fortune by creating self-mocking black stereotypes. Context seems all, or much at any rate. One might imagine the comedy team of Butz and Watt barnstorming America hearing nary a titter in places where...