"Cut the crap"
The Guardian
April 16, 2007
By Sasha Abramsky

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Senior Fellow Sasha Abramsky argues that, "Don Imus was always a crude and revolting 'shock jock' - but no-one seemed to mind until he went a step too far."

Cut the crap
Don Imus was always a crude and revolting "shock jock" - but no-one seemed to mind until he went a step too far.

By Sasha Abramsky
April 16, 2007 3:00 PM

It's been a strange week for the world of broadcast media in America. Don Imus, one of the original, and most popular, of the radio "shock jocks," made, on air, a shamefully racist comment about African-American women of the Rutgers University basketball team. For reasons known only to himself he decided, on air, to call them "nappy-headed hos [whores]."

Yes, that's right, a man who has made a spectacularly successful career out of selling bigoted, stupid, inanities to his audience - which, alas, numbers in the millions -- uttered a bigoted, stupid, inanity. Ain't that a surprise? After all, this is a man who, according to the progressive media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has called top African-American journalists "quota hires." Six years ago his on-air cohort Sid Rosenberg labeled tennis celebrity Venus Williams an "animal." Rosenberg has also called Palestinians "stinking animals." An equal-opportunity offender, Imus called one Jewish reporter a "beanie-wearing Jewboy."

FAIR has documented Imus's bigotry many times over the past decade. The man has gone after gays, women, blacks, Muslims. Basically, he's perfected the art of toilet humor; he is, essentially, a crude man - like the Andy Griffith character in the classic movie A Face in the Crowd; emotionally he is an adolescent who, somehow, has attracted such a vast crowd of loyal, presumably often equally immature, listeners that he has become a power in his own right. As a result, his CBS radio show, simulcast on the MSNBC cable TV station, became a go-to for an array of star interviewees. Top politicians prostrated themselves to get on Imus. Ambitious authors drooled at the possibility of an interview by the shock jock.

Then, on April 4, Imus called the young college basketball players "nappy-headed hos." And suddenly all hell broke loose. The event was played over and over again on internet sites like YouTube as well as CNN. A political firestorm broke out. Advertisers began abandoning the show. CBS and MSNBC announced their star broadcaster would be suspended for two weeks.

Hypocrisy doesn't even begin to describe the actions of the broadcast companies, the advertisers and the big-ticket names who began canceling their appearances on Imus's show. After all, CBS and MSNBC hired Imus to shock; they paid him the big bucks because his poisonous worldview resonates with a frighteningly large proportion of the population; and they tolerated all his previous flirtations with vicious bigotry because he was guaranteed to bring in huge sums of money. The advertisers flocked to his show not because he was a gentle Mahatma Gandhi character but because his raw, ugly, rhetoric and his bandying about of every gross stereotype he could lay his mouth on made them see dollar bills floating in front of their eyes.
His interviewees, some of them conservative but many of them dyed-in-the-wool liberals, turned a blind eye to the sewage spewing from his lips into the microphone. After all, they reasoned, even if he said nasty things, it was a glorious opportunity to reach epic crowds of listeners.

Yet after April 4th, somehow a consensus emerged out of all the cacophony. Imus had passed some indefinable tipping point. CNN treated it as a "breaking news" story, breathily covering every verbal twist and turn in the sorry saga. Newspapers devoted an extraordinary amount of page one space to the tale.

Don Imus groveled for his career on Al Sharpton's radio show, an appropriate venue given Sharpton's also problematic history - the man was widely denounced as a demagogue and a racial firebrand in the 1990s; yet somehow, in the last decade he has managed to refashion himself as a mainstream spokesperson for the African American community. It was to no avail. Senator John McCain said he would be prepared to give Imus a second chance. Many others, including Barack Obama, said it was time for the shock jock to go.

Over the next few days, inexorably, the pressure continued to build. First MSNBC announced it was ending its simulcast of the Imus show. Then CBS announced it was firing Imus.

As if all of this wasn't enough, on Thursday New Jersey governor Jon Corzine brokered a peace meeting between Imus and the basketball players - and then was almost killed in a car accident on his way to the meeting. He's on a ventilator in a hospital, suffering from multiple broken bones.

Now, the saga's over - though I wouldn't be surprised if all the parties involved go on to make millions selling their stories to the tabloid press. Imus is, at least for now, off the airwaves, and that's certainly good news. But all of those who made money, for so many years, off the crap that this man peddled should be ashamed of themselves. They should be ashamed that they turned a blind eye for so long. And they should be ashamed that they pretended, after April 4, to be surprised at the bigotries he uttered.