In the great race to determine which newspaper can be more awkward in its efforts to shield vulnerable readers from naughty words, the New York Times and the Washington Post recently reached new lows in their coverage of George Allen's mouth. Virginia's Senator Allen, it seems, said something weird and racist to a visitor to his farm in the early 1980s. Referring to the turtles in his lake, Allen allegedly said something along the lines of, "Around here, only niggers eat 'em." Here's how the papers covered the news:

Washington Post
Taylor said that during a visit to Allen's Charlottesville house in 1982, Allen pointed to turtles in a pond on his property and said only "the [epithets] eat them."

New York Times
Mr. Allen, Mr. Taylor said, told him that ''around here'' the only people who ''eat 'em'' were African-Americans, whom he described with the notorious epithet for blacks.

What's so bad about taking the word "nigger" out of the quotes? Besides creating extremely cumbersome sentences, the papers have removed the jarring speech, and thus made Allen sound like less of a jackass than he allegedly is. In this regard, Gelf must give credit to Salon, which originally broke the allegations of the younger Allen's propensity for using the word. While the article opens soft (the lead contains the phrase "inflammatory racial epithet"), Salon twice makes sure that its readers know that what's at stake here is the use of the specific word "nigger"—and not "[epithet]".