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President Bush’s ostensibly private conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday at a G-8 luncheon, which ended up being caught by an open mic and later broadcast publicly, has now become one of yesterday’s more popular news stories. The conversation is currently the second most popular video on CBSNews.com. As Bush’s utterance of an expletive during the conversation became the general headline to the story, it inevitably gave rise to discussion about how news networks, newspapers and Web sites would handle usage of the word of the day: sh*t.

Peter Johnson rounds up the outcome in USA Today:

CNN broadcast and posted unedited video. The New York Times and The Washington Post reported the word in Web stories. On CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News, MSNBC and USA TODAY, the word was excised in videos and Web stories (though an audio clip with a warning at USA TODAY included it). The Times and the Post said they'd publish the word today; USA TODAY will not.

“Broadcast news organizations,” noted Poynter’s Scott Libin, “have considerations cable networks don’t face. It will be interesting to see if any holder of a broadcast license chooses this case as a test of the Federal Communications Commission’s commitment to keeping the airwaves clean.” Of course, as it turned out, none of the broadcast networks did test the FCC waters.

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