A scene in the most recent episode of “The Wire,” in which Mr. Fancypants Managing Editor tells intrepid city editor Gus Haynes not to swear in the newsroom, has struck a chord, particularly at Slate’s ongoing discussions of the fifth season, which has now moved to Romenesko as well. I would like to take the bait and make the argument for not swearing in the newsroom.

My first reason is aesthetic, mostly. As the episode plainly showed, the people who do swear in the newsroom are the buffoonish fat guys who stand around, talk loud and swear a lot. It makes for a newsroom culture that’s unpleasant and off-putting if you’re not one of the loud fat guys. Imagine trying to work in that scene in “The Wire,” while three of the office fuckheads stand around, with one offering up his oh-so-clever annotations of the mayor’s press conference, as the other two, who just happen to be his employees, laugh appreciatively.

Secondly, it’s a way to intimidate younger and quieter people. We’ve already seen Haynes berate a younger female employee for using a word wrong—he hollers at her across the newsroom and then announces her mistake to the whole office. I keep coming back to this because it strikes me as an extremely thuggish move on Haynes’ part, but it’s clear that in David Simon’s mind this is the essence of old-time newspaperin’. For me it is just icing on the cake that Haynes (and Simon) were wrong about the word in question, but then that’s a slice of real life as well. (The loud fat guys are often wrong.) But for the record, Haynes would have been being a jerk even if he had been right. (He was being a drama queen, too. That’s what editors are supposed to do: fix potential mistakes. What kind of editor announces it to the newsroom? Right: A dickwad editor.)

Those are the two professional arguments against it. The third is more existential, and it is this: If you think the problem with newspapers these days is petty little stuff like this, you’re as crazy as David Simon. While the Simon and the fat guys were standing around swearing in the newsroom, newspaper profits began to drop, younger folks started to grow up not reading the morning paper… and then the internet happened and the world changed. We may see a major daily newspaper go bankrupt in the next year or two. Are there actually journalists out there who think this is something to waste any time thinking about?

Which brings me to point four. What’s really wrong with journalism is that daily newspapers in the US for the most part did not take ownership of a changing delivery system for news. Period. Lest you think that this has something to do with their obsession with the bottom line, they didn’t take ownership of a changing delivery system for advertising, either. There are many other smaller issues involved, but those two simple sentences describe 90 percent of the problem. The questions daily newspaper employees should ask (and be asked) is, what did they do to help? Did they think about the future, embrace the internet, sound the alarm, advocate for change? Or did they sit on their fat asses, let the unions spar with management, and then sit around and whine about the good old days when the roof caved in?

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