Over the past week, I&rsquo;ve heard a lot of opinion from readers about The Kansas City Star&rsquo;s coverage of Chiefs running back Larry Johnson telling reporters to &ldquo;Get your faggot ass out of here,&rdquo; and writing on Twitter that another user had a &ldquo;fag pic&rdquo; in a profile.</p><p>&ldquo;I am so disappointed yet again with your reporting,&rdquo; wrote Jana Mathis. &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t any different for your reporter to repeat it than it is for Larry to say it in the first place. &hellip; Two wrongs don&rsquo;t make a right!&rdquo;</p><p>Karen Martin had a similar take: &ldquo;I fail to understand why, when a person makes a remark that includes a hurtful and derogatory word to describe a black person, it must be abbreviated (the &lsquo;n-word&rsquo;), but when a remark is made that includes a word about a gay man that conveys that same hurt and degradation, it&rsquo;s still OK to use the complete term. Why is it that you can print the &lsquo;f-word&rsquo; in its entirety without qualms?&rdquo;</p><p>In reality, there is no rule set in stone about when a word should appear in full or instead by abbreviation or description. Everyone would have probably gotten the point if the stories had mentioned &ldquo;common slurs directed at gay men&rdquo; instead of printing the actual words.</p><p>But The Star has certainly printed many controversial words in total, and for many years. A 1994 story about gay Midwesterners noted an overpass spray-painted with &ldquo;Faggots die.&rdquo; A 1996 story on New York City subway shooter Bernard Goetz quoted court testimony that Goetz had referred to &ldquo;spics and niggers&rdquo; (and also that his own lawyer called him &ldquo;a nerd, a geek, a peckerwood, a cracker&rdquo;).</p><p>My personal preference is that when words are a key part of the news, there&rsquo;s no legitimate reason for journalists not to print them. The same goes for opinion columnists who address issues of bias. Star writers such as Lewis Diuguid and Mary Sanchez have printed these derogatory terms while discussing how people use them, and I don&rsquo;t recall ever hearing readers&rsquo; objection to that context.</p><p>At the same time, I absolutely respect the sentiments of those who disagree. One commenter on my blog wrote, &ldquo;As long as The Star repeats slurs, the slurs will be tolerated by society &mdash; and continue to be accepted by the bad boy wannabes.&rdquo;</p><p>I&rsquo;d also agree that there must be a subjective line of taste. Writers can use provocative language to great effect, both in fiction and non-fiction, but I don&rsquo;t think most readers find a general-interest newspaper or its Web site to be appropriate venues for that dialogue.</p><p>A few other readers thought The Star fumbled LJ coverage for a different reason.</p><p>&ldquo;Best example of the media making a story about itself,&rdquo; said a caller last week. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t really care what a reporter overheard.&rdquo;</p><p>Perhaps &mdash; but Johnson was on the clock when he made the remark, and speaking to the media is in the job description.</p><p>Mountain or molehill, it&rsquo;s a topic worth discussing.