The memories from the Clinton-Lewinsky days seem almost quaint by now, but at the time the questions for editorial decision-makers were excruciating. What language can you use on television when the facts of a story include sexual or otherwise offensive content?

The old Clinton-era dilemma started ringing in my ears again as I watched some of my old cable-news colleagues dancing around the Rev. Jesse Jackson's metaphorical reference to Barack Obama's anatomy. A decade after news executives wrestled with how to report profanity with one of the most difficult and unlikely cases in the history of news, a much less complicated situation has brought us back -- way back -- to before the pre-Clinton days, to the Leave It To Beaver era of treating the public as elementary school children.

The first moment I remember witnessing the wrenching dilemma came, of all places, in Cuba. In January 1998 I walked, exhausted, into CNN's Havana offices straight into the most unusual editorial meeting I had ever seen. Along with a CNN team, I had spent almost a week crisscrossing the island, covering what was supposed to be a high-interest trip by Pope John Paul II.

Along the way, network correspondents had started dropping out of the traveling press. Requests for our reports from Cuba had started to fade as Washington began to boil with rumors of serious presidential misconduct. Even the Cubans at the pope's masses would stop us to get details. By the time we made it back to Havana, the Drudge Report had revealed much of what we now know of the relationship between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. I thought my hearing was playing games with me when I heard a reporter ask, ``Can we say oral sex on the air?''

Was my aunt watching?

What had started as an investigation into a real estate transaction, the Whitewater deal, had morphed into a much more serious investigation in the hands of Independent Counsel Ken Starr.

The case was exploding. The president faced a possible impeachment. It was as big a story as we would ever cover, and it was impossible to tell it without getting into some pretty awkward details.

Several months later, on loan from CNN to CNN's Spanish-language network, I found myself describing live on the air the details of the Starr Report. There I was, referring in Spanish to the erotic uses of a cigar, the incriminating stain found on a dress and other sordid aspects of a case that could change the course of history. I hoped my relatives in South America were not watching.

Back then, CNN's White House correspondent Wolf Blitzer mastered the art of keeping a straight face when reporting news that blurred the fuzzy frontiers between comedy and pornography. A decade later, as ringmaster of CNN's frenetic The Situation Room, the normally equanimous Blitzer feigned shock when first reporting Jackson's less-than-shocking words.

The program brought Jackson's heartfelt apology, analysis, discussion, but no quote of what it was exactly the reverend said. Sounding like the boy who knows a juicy secret, Blitzer explained, ''We can't precisely say what [Jackson] was saying before that open mike because it's so crude.'' Like millions of others, I presume, I hurried to check the Internet where I expected to find, well, something so crude it could not be repeated on television.

By now you know Jackson's exact words, and I am guessing your moral foundation did not crumble after obtaining the secret knowledge. Jackson, the civil rights icon, is apparently so annoyed with Obama that he would like to ''cut his nuts off.'' Shocking.

By the next day, the video with the scratchy sound of the offending comment was made public and cable networks started showing it with subtitles, protecting us from the objectionable word by writing something like N*!, Perhaps reading the full four letters would have been more than we could handle. (A look at Wikipedia, interestingly, reveals that a nut is a fruit in which the ovary wall becomes hard. Ouch!)

America can take it

It took some time for the perceived profanity to become secondary to the story, making way for the real news, discussion of the content of Jackson's statement and the fact that it showed strains within the African-American community and Obama's perceived lecturing to them.

Jackson undid himself in apologies for his ''crude and hurtful'' remarks.

Much of the media acted as if the words would undermine the moral fabric of America. A decade ago, news executives were all but forced to treat their viewers as adults. Now, they have reverted to viewing us as children, forgetting that, like children, we have already heard off-color words. For future reference: We can handle it. Really.

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