What's Wrong With Reporting on the 'Broke Niggas Thievin'?'

By Lauren Smiley Tue., Mar. 2 2010 at 6:20 PM

Categories: Media

No offensive gang names, please...

San Francisco reporters faced a conundrum yesterday when DA Kamala Harris announced the grand jury indictment of the self-proclaimed Broke Niggas Thievin' gang. What do you do when you're reporting on alleged thugs who call themselves the most offensive word in the English language? Do you print it? Do you say it on air?

The Associated Press Stylebook -- generally regarded as the bible of grammar in straightforward news writing -- tells reporters to generally avoid using acronyms that the readers won't easily understand, with exceptions for well-known entities like the CIA, FBI, and the TV network ABC.

But most Bay Area news outlets didn't heed the Associated Press' call -- not even the Associated Press -- and opted to abbreviate Broke Niggas Thievin to "BNT." (Not to be confused with Bulgarian National Television.) The Chron and the Examiner maintained a straight faced B.N.T. throughout their pieces today, too, without ever expanding on what, exactly, it stands for.

Understandably, the lily white anchors on network news channels didn't want to drop the n-bomb on air either. KCBS' reporter stuck to "BNT gang," with clips of Harris at the press conference declaring "This is going cut the head off of that gang" and "We're not going to let these individuals terrorize our streets." (Harris' press release writes out the entire name, but from what we can gather from the sound bites she didn't actually say it out loud at her press conference.) KRON 4 played it even more safe, dropping even the BNT acronym in favor of "gang members" or just "the gang."

Not everyone was so damn sensitive. Bay City News decided if Broke Niggas Thievin' was good enough for the gang, it was good enough for their story. The SF Appeal decided to just be up front about the issue in their humorous headline "10 From Gang With Very Non-PC Name Charged in Murder, Other Crimes" for the Bay City News story. The Fugitive Watch Web site used the entire moniker in the story, but typed a huge disclaimer into the headline: "Warning Article Contains Language That May Be Considered Offensive." And, of course, a couple of overtly racist message boards we won't link to here delighted in printing in the name repeatedly.

But upon typing in "broke niggas theivin" to Google, we discovered the cyber source of record on the name. First hit? Us.