News organizations already have a precedent for this in their style guides. The Associated Press stylebook warns against the use of obscenities, but says they can be printed if there is a “compelling reason” to do so and if they are a part of direct quotations. The New York Times style guide states, “readers should not be left uninformed or baffled about the nature of a significant controversy.” But all too often readers are indeed left uninformed or baffled, because leeway is rarely granted. (A Tumblr called Fit to Print exists solely to establish “a catalog of expletive avoidance” from this newspaper.)

There have been numerous cases in recent years when the use of offensive language has been the news story itself. In 1998, Representative Dan Burton referred to President Clinton with an offensive word. In 2000, a microphone picked up George W. Bush using a vulgar term to describe the New York Times reporter Adam Clymer. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney insulted Senator Pat Leahy on the Senate floor with yet another vulgarity. In 2007, Isaiah Washington was kicked off the television show “Grey’s Anatomy” for referring to his fellow actor T. R. Knight with a gay slur. This January, Representative Michael Grimm threatened an aggressive reporter, using an obscenity.

These stories were covered widely, but in most cases, the details were obscured. The relevant words were described variously as “an obscenity,” “a vulgarity,” “an antigay epithet”; replaced with rhyming substitutions; printed with some letters omitted; and, most absurdly, in The Washington Times (whose editor confessed this was “an attempt at a little humor”), alluded to as “a vulgar euphemism for a rectal aperture.” We learn from these stories that something important happened, but that it can’t actually be reported.

The cover story of the March issue of The Atlantic is a critical look at fraternities in which the author, Caitlin Flanagan, mentions “a particular variety of sexual torture reserved for hazing and best not described in the gentle pages of this magazine.” This jokey omission materially weakens the exact point she is making: that we should pay attention to what is going on inside fraternity houses. Scott Stossel, the magazine’s editor, acknowledged to me that “we probably should have included a description of the practice in question. The omission may well have frustrated readers.”

In other instances, the excised words are not the subject of reported news but are nonetheless integral to the story, as when artistic works have titles that can’t be printed by reviewers. Harry Frankfurt wrote a serious work of philosophy, published by Princeton University Press, which remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 27 weeks, despite a title containing what was once frequently euphemized as a “barnyard epithet”; the same word appeared in a widely praised memoir by the poet Nick Flynn. Several prominent plays have included a version or compound of the F-word in their titles, including Aaron Posner’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington; a monologue by Mike Daisey about Ayn Rand that ran at the Public Theater in New York; and a play by Stephen Adly Guirgis that ran on Broadway.