[Peace-discuss] Imus

[David Green]

April 9, 2007
  The Media Equation
  With Imus, They Keep Coming Back   By DAVID CARR
    “Imus in the Morning” is scheduled to start this morning like any other, with Don Imus and his crew cracking wise about the weekend’s events, riffing off the news and chatting with Evan Thomas, one of Newsweek’s top guns. Later Tom Oliphant, Washington author and former op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe, will check in for some political talk. 
  Given that Mr. Imus spent part of last week describing the student athletes at Rutgers as “nappy-headed ho’s,” you might think he’d have trouble booking anyone, let alone A-list establishment names. But Mr. Imus, who has been given a pass for this sort of comment in the past, also generously provides airtime to those parts of the news media and political apparatus that would generally be expected to bring him to account. 
   
  Mr. Imus’s comment about the Rutgers team last week was not just, as they say, over the line — you can’t even see the line from where he landed. It was not a gaffe, a slip of the tongue, a joke in poor taste. (Nor was the on-air comment to Mr. Imus by the show’s longtime producer, Bernard McGuirk, calling the women’s final the “Jigaboos vs. the Wannabees,” in a bad attempt to borrow a phrase from a Spike Lee movie.) Mr. Imus’s slur was the kind of unalloyed racial insult that might not have passed muster on a low-watt AM station in the Jim Crow South. 
   
  On Thursday, before his employers knew they had a growing public-relations problem on their hands, Mr. Imus suggested that everyone needed to relax and should not be offended by “some idiot comment meant to be amusing.” (Which part was supposed to be funny? The nappy-head or the ho’s?) 
   
  That’s not to say that everyone at MSNBC, which simulcasts the show, and its owner NBC (a unit of the General Electric Company), along with CBS Radio, which owns WFAN and syndicates the show, wasn’t terribly, terribly sorry. Before apologizing, network executives at MSNBC pointed out that, “ ‘Imus in the Morning’ is not a production of the cable network and is produced by WFAN Radio,” which is a little like saying that they did not manufacture a bomb, they only delivered it.
   
  This isn’t the first time that Mr. Imus has trolled these waters: he once called Gwen Ifill, then working at The New York Times, “a cleaning lady” and described one of the paper’s sports columnists, William C. Rhoden, as a “quota hire.” Both of those journalists are black, but Mr. Imus’s defenders like to point out that he is an equal-opportunity misanthrope whose show displays 360-degree offensiveness toward all sorts of ethnicities, sexual orientations and religious affiliations. 
   
  Although the Web has been alive with calls for sanctions against Mr. Imus — the clip is available for all to see on YouTube — mainstream media have remained relatively silent. He is, after all, popular, good at his job and, perhaps more important, he generously provides oxygen — and an audience — to the kind of journalistic and political elites who would be expected to demand his head on a pike. 
   
  He is, to borrow one of the show’s metaphors, a lawn jockey to the establishment. Few politicians, big or small, pass up a chance to bump knees with Mr. Imus, in part because his show is one of the few places where they can talk seriously and at length about public issues. Senator John Kerry has stopped by. Senator John McCain is on frequently. And Senators Joseph I. Lieberman and Joseph R. Biden are part of a legion eager to sit in the guest chair. 
   
  NBC News uses “Imus in the Morning” to promote the brands of Tim Russert, Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory. Tom Brokaw was a frequent guest, and his replacement, Brian Williams, has been sanctified by the I-man, as they call him. Chris Matthews from MSNBC has appeared, as have anchors and journalists from CNN and CBS and, on the print side, by reporters and editors from Newsweek and popular opinion columnists from The New York Times. 
   
  “Whatever problem there was, I think that he took care of with his statement of Friday,” said Mr. Oliphant, one of the guests scheduled for this morning. “It was classic Imus. He said he screwed up and he was sorry. Bang. Bang. It was very much to the point, and did not offer any excuses.”
   
  The other guest scheduled today said the show must go on. “He should not have said what he said, obviously,” said Mr. Thomas of Newsweek. “I am going on the show, though. I think if I didn’t, it would be posturing. I have been going on the show for quite some time and he occasionally goes over the line.” Mr. Imus may rib his exalted guests, but he generally stays away from the racial humor and invective that is part of the connective tissue of the rest of the show. Perhaps that gives the politicians and opinion makers enough plausible deniability to sit comfortably across from Mr. Imus. 
   
  There have been temporary breakups in the long-running affair. After Mr. Imus stepped over quite a few lines at the dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association in 1996, Cokie Roberts, now an analyst for ABC News, said, “Now none of us can go on his show again.” But she went back; they always do. 
   
  To borrow another trope from Mr. Imus — in a conversation last year on the show with Mr. Matthews, he reworked the title of “Brokeback Mountain” in into a bit of homophobic, gross-out humor — they just can’t quit him. (MSNBC was sorry for that one, too.)
   
  Part of the reason that his corporate owners are eager to apologize, eager for the latest gaffe to blow over, is so that they can get back to counting the lucre he generates. Mr. Imus has been a boon for MSNBC because he provides a cheap and effective way for the third-ranked cable news network to compete in the morning (it doesn’t cost a lot to film a radio show). CNN recently switched morning anchors in part because of the ratings strength that Mr. Imus was generating. 
   
  On the radio, Mr. Imus may have lost some of the heat that he used to generate — Talkers magazine, a trade publication, ranked him 14th among United States radio hosts — but he is still the go-to guy for selling books, in part because when he becomes interested in a book, he will flog it for days and sometimes weeks. 
   
  He fills a demand for serious discussion on contemporary radio so that the journalists and politicians pushing an agenda or a book don’t have to get in line behind the strippers at Howard Stern’s show. 
   
  So who is left to hold Mr. Imus accountable? For the time being, that would be the Rev. Al Sharpton, who told The Associated Press, “I accept his apology, just as I want his bosses to accept his resignation.” (Late yesterday, Mr. Imus agreed to go on Mr. Sharpton’s syndicated radio show today.)
   
  It is hard to say how much coverage the protests will get. Had Fox’s Bill O’Reilly said what Mr. Imus said, he might have been confronted with pitchforks and torches outside his studio. Last month, after Ann Coulter used a homophobic term to describe presidential candidate John Edwards, she received opprobrium from dozens of media outlets, including MSNBC, which featured a running count of the number of outlets that had dropped her column. Earlier this year, Mr. Biden got creamed for describing Senator Barack Obama as “clean” and “articulate.”
   
  Mr. Imus’s friends will tell you that he is not a racist in his heart. But what is or is not in the heart of a radio talk show host is much less important than what comes out of his mouth. 


 
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