Political correctness and the American newspaper: the case of the Los Angeles Times Stylebook

Abstract

ON DECEMBER 2, 1993, David Nyhan of the Boston Globe published an article entitled “The Thought Police Strike Again.” In a parody of novelist Raymond Chandler's immortal Los Angeles detective, Philip Marlowe, Nyhan wrote:

“I was in my office, on the fringe of the ghetto, feeling gypped because a check had bounced, watching the crazy divorcée in the next office, a real babe who used to be a nifty co-ed before she married her hillbilly. He was a piece of white trash whose holy roller ancestors fought the Indians.