“I can probably say that word, but I just won’t,” the CNN host Don Lemon said on Thursday night, as he tangled with the obscenity-laced quotations that were displayed on screen.

Mr. Lemon was wrestling with a thorny problem that was challenging all news organizations: Just hours earlier, The New Yorker had published an interview with Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump’s new communications director, that was a censor’s nightmare. Lacing his remarks with profanities and vulgar references, Mr. Scaramucci had warned his colleagues he would fire them, threatened to kill leakers in the White House and attacked the president’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus (since departed), and the chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

“The language is pretty rough here,” Mr. Lemon said, as he stumbled and tumbled over Mr. Scaramucci’s words. “Is this what the president wanted?”

Over the course of Thursday night, CNN shifted the way it displayed Mr. Scaramucci’s comments. At first it included just an F and a G with asterisks between for one of the offensive words, but later it filled in the blanks until only two letters, C and K, were missing. Mr. Lemon at one point used the word “C-block’’ instead of the one Mr. Scaramucci had actually used.