ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its empirical focus two media spectacles where US-American female celebrities were ‘caught’ transgressing taboos having accidently exposed their ‘naughty bits’ in public. Through these two moments, and in drawing from an extensive dataset of articles in the month following each incident, we witness journalists in action as an undoubtedly high-profile, elite community of language workers. The wordsmithery of newsmakers is somewhat incongruous given the widespread assertion of their professional commitment to objectivity, to ‘reporting the facts’. Recognizing some of the cultural and institutional constraints in ‘speaking’ about the supposedly unmentionable, we show how journalists artfully manage the wordsmith-reporter dynamic – not necessarily successfully – in deploying both language games and containment games. Specifically, we identify two tensions which seem to characterize their ‘reporting’ of taboo: repression/invocation and prurience/prudishness. While determinedly performing their professional identities as cunning wordsmiths, we find journalists also expressing blatant – in this case, sexist – opinions about other people. Far from reporting the news, they seem to be making it up.
