Reading striker Dave Kitson raised a few eyebrows last week by saying he did not give “two shits” about the FA Cup.
Except what he said depended on which newspaper you read, the Guardian media section reported, without mentioning that the excellent Said and Done column in the previous day’s Observer, edited by Dave Hill, had got there with the story first.
Nevertheless, the variations on the theme are worth examining.
In The Times he could not give a “damn”, only to appear in Gabby Logan’s column in the same paper the following day quoted as saying he “couldn’t care less”.
Three other papers obscured the offending word with varying degrees of asterisks (three in the Mail, two in the Mirror and the Sun), while the ever imaginative Express went for “I could not give two hoots”.
In the Evening Standard he “didn’t care”, while the Independent took the plunge and went – nervous readers please look away now – for the full “two shits”.
What the Guardian‘s media piece failed to mention was that while the rest of what we might loosely describe as Fleet Street saw some news value in Kitson’s remarks, their colleagues on the sports desk at Farringdon Road did not.
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