Imus is gone

[ghost of miles]

CBS just fired him:

CBS fires Don Imus from radio show 1 minute ago

NEW YORK - CBS fired Don Imus from his radio show Thursday, the finale to a stunning fall for one of the nation's most prominent broadcasters.

Imus initially was suspended for two weeks for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" on the air last week, but outrage continued to grow and advertisers bolted from his programs.

"There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society," CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves said in announcing the decision. "That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision."

I'm sure he'll try for a second act on satellite radio.

[JPF]

[7/4]

CBS just fired him:

CBS fires Don Imus from radio show 1 minute ago

NEW YORK - CBS fired Don Imus from his radio show Thursday, the finale to a stunning fall for one of the nation's most prominent broadcasters.

Imus initially was suspended for two weeks for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" on the air last week, but outrage continued to grow and advertisers bolted from his programs.

"There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society," CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves said in announcing the decision. "That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision."

I'm sure he'll try for a second act on satellite radio.

I was just telling someone this 45 min ago before we knew he was fired.

[Alexander]

This is soooooo stupid. What he said was dumb and insensitive, but come on! This isn't even like Michael Richards saying the "n" word. Imus was just trying to sound hip.

[RDK]

I agree. Never really listened to Imus and haven't liked what little I've heard of him, but he was made a scapegoat for a much bigger issue, imo, by Sharpton and Jackson.

[Big Al]

This is soooooo stupid. What he said was dumb and insensitive, but come on! This isn't even like Michael Richards saying the "n" word. Imus was just trying to sound hip.

Totally agree, and totally agree with RDK. CBS cratered.

Edited April 12, 2007 by Big Al

[Man with the Golden Arm]

This is soooooo stupid. What he said was dumb and insensitive, but come on! This isn't even like Michael Richards saying the "n" word. Imus was just trying to sound hip.

Wrong. Richards was in an adult comedy club trying to make Lenny Bruce roll over in his grave.

Imus was delivering on our airwaves a stupidly pointed put down subjective observation of some pretty motivated young women.

Adios, you lily livered, oil duster wearin', shaggy headed, beige honky, pseudo ranch hand.

[Rooster_Ties]

This is soooooo stupid. What he said was dumb and insensitive, but come on! This isn't even like Michael Richards saying the "n" word. Imus was just trying to sound hip.

Was Imus just "tryin' to sound hip" when he said this (on the air) of none other than Gwen Ifill...

“Isn’t The (New York) Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

Here's the full story, that I posted elsewhere a few days ago...

Op-Ed Contributor

Trash Talk Radio

By GWEN IFILL

Published: April 10, 2007

Washington

LET’S say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather.

The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.

In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee’s Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers’ Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That’s the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It’s what explodes so many March Madness office pools.

But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.

The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before.

I know, because he apparently did it to me.

I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.

Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.

It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.

“Isn’t The (New York) Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

I was taken aback but not outraged. I’d certainly been called worse and indeed jumped at the chance to use the old insult to explain to my NBC bosses why I did not want to appear on the Imus show.

I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me.

It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult.

Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus’s program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don’t know any black journalists who will. To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.

Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well.

So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.

Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.

Gwen Ifill is a senior correspondent for “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and the moderator of “Washington Week.”

Edited April 12, 2007 by Rooster_Ties

[Brad]

So you know where I'm coming from, I've been an Imus fan for over 20 years. However, lately, he has been getting kind of boring, what with all the politics and the country music, and I didn't listen to him as much lately.

But this is just fucking ridiculous. What he said was wrong but he said things like this for a long time. If you want to say it's all wrong, yes you're right. However, he apologized profusely and he did a lot of good things, helping to build the children's cancer wing for Hackensack Hospital, the Tomorrow's Children Fund and the Ranch for Kids with Cancer.

It's a sad reflection that a moron like Sharpton can assume the mantle of leadership for getting him fired. How about Sharpton apologizing for what he did to the Duke players?

Forgiveness in this country seems to have gone out the window.

We wouldn't be realistic if we didn't acknowledge that all the people he skewered over the years like that idiot Matt Lauer smelled blood in the water and used the opportunity for payback.

Sad day for this country in my opinion.

[sal]

Despite the comments from both Imus and Michael Richards, stupid as they were, I am really not seeing either of them as racism. Imus was trying to be funny, and as mentioned above, Richards was going for the Lenny Bruce thing. I don't think either of them are racist.

Funny how nobody mentioned Newt Gingrich's "language of the ghetto" rant last week when refering to bilingual education. That was more racist than either of the above in my opinion.

[Scott Dolan]

This is soooooo stupid. What he said was dumb and insensitive, but come on! This isn't even like Michael Richards saying the "n" word. Imus was just trying to sound hip.

Wrong. Richards was in an adult comedy club trying to make Lenny Bruce roll over in his grave.

Imus was delivering on our airwaves a stupidly pointed put down subjective observation of some pretty motivated young women.

Adios, you lily livered, oil duster wearin', shaggy headed, beige honky, pseudo ranch hand.

+1

But, I do think the media flap over this is ridiculous.

[ejp626]

While Richards rant was incredibly ugly and indefensible, at least it is in the context of being heckled. Out of nowhere Imus and his producer start calling the Rutgers players ho's. There is no call for that, and despite the fact that Imus is pretty out of it, who really doesn't know that even in rap that term isn't just thrown around but is applied to "no good women" who aren't doing anything to get out of the ghetto.

In any case, Imus was going on about how he can be trusted to keep his word and clean up his act, and Clarence Page brings up this pledge that Imus agreed to YEARS AGO that he would stop making racial slurs on the air. So he has already had plenty of chances.

[alocispepraluger102]

i became admirers of the rutgers ladies during the big east and ncaa tourneys and followed them closely.

coach stringer is a remarkable lady well worth reading about.

the piling on by the racial opportunists is as ugly as the imus remarks.

radio station wfan became the top grossing radio station in this country for years on don imus back.

it is, in my opinion, effectively the end of the run of success for wfan. without doubt, the long time manager of wfan will become a scapegoat, and many long established well paid hosts will be uprooted.

[rachel]

paraphrased...."The Tennessee girls were pretty cute, though. It was the jiggaboos versus the wannabees..."

How is that not racist?

[ghost of miles]

When will we as a society get to the point where an epithet used against a woman is considered as bad and offensive as a racial epithet?

[Alexander]

paraphrased...."The Tennessee girls were pretty cute, though. It was the jiggaboos versus the wannabees..."

How is that not racist?

I am almost 100% sure that this particular comment was HEAVILY informed by the Spike Lee film "School Daze." If you recall, the film centers (in a humorous way) on racial tensions at an all black university. Two competing sororities do a song-and-dance number in which the fair-skinned, straight-haired rich girls call their darker rivals "jiggaboos" while the other girls call the light-skinned girls "wannabees" (as in "wannabe white").

Here's the clip.

Again (and I am no fan of Imus. I've never once listened to his program), it seems PAINFULLY obvious that Imus was trying to latch on to the hip-factor of black trash-talk. African-American women can call one another "nappy-headed ho's" without meaning it as a real insult (just as I can call my wife a "shiksa" without her getting mad at me). Essentially, I think that Imus was trying to talk like he imagined the players THEMSELVES talk among themselves. It was a huge miscalculation, but I don't think that he should lose his job over it.

[alocispepraluger102]

When will we as a society get to the point where an epithet used against a woman is considered as bad and offensive as a racial epithet?

i always try, and have too often failed to, remember that every woman we see is someone's little daughter, and that i have have a daughter and grand daughter.

[Alexander]

When will we as a society get to the point where an epithet used against a woman is considered as bad and offensive as a racial epithet?

I think intention is the key, however. Was Imus really trying to oppress women and/or African-Americans? Or was he just trying to be funny?

[kulu se mama]

When will we as a society get to the point where an epithet used against a woman is considered as bad and offensive as a racial epithet?

i agree.

and what about derogatory terms for homosexuals.

everyone seems to get a free pass on this one.

i noramlly stay out of the political discussions - i think this topic might apply - but i feel the need to weigh in on this topic.

while i understand that it is acceptable for a member of any minority group to poke fun at him or herself and others within the group, i feel that imus's problem is more of an age/cultural problem than a race problem.

i believe that rap music and gangster rap in particular has been allowed to proliferate and enter the mainstream without much argument from the typical spokespeople (i.e. jesse jackson, al sharpton).

bill cosby has been consistent and relentless in calling for an end to all of this language in all forms.

cosby has taken some heat from the black community for his stance.

i think imus was attempting to be hip, and i don't think he was aware of the invisible border that exists.

what i am trying to say is - if this language and attitude is allowed to exist without resistance, dont' be surprised when it sprouts up in other places.

i will be very interested to see what type of protest jesse jackson and al sharpton make at the headquarters of death row records.

al sharpton was on bill o'reilly last night (not a show that i normally watch), and bill o'reilly asked al sharpton about jesse jackson's "hymie town" remark.

al sharpton had the oddacity to defend it.

unbelievable.

i remember a few years ago when rosa parks sued outkast over the use of her name because she did not like some of the language that they were using.

now that i can support.

sorry for the rambling and the misspelled words.

[Alexander]

When will we as a society get to the point where an epithet used against a woman is considered as bad and offensive as a racial epithet?

i agree.

and what about derogatory terms for homosexuals.

everyone seems to get a free pass on this one.

I have to speak to my students about this ALL THE TIME. Personally, I think that the hateful things people say about gays are more potentially damaging than those about women, blacks, or nearly any other group. Why? Because no 13 year old boy/girl is close to slitting his/her wrists over coming out as black or a woman.

[kulu se mama]

I have to speak to my students about this ALL THE TIME. Personally, I think that the hateful things people say about gays are more potentially damaging than those about women, blacks, or nearly any other group. Why? Because no 13 year old boy/girl is close to slitting his/her wrists over coming out as black or a woman.

my wife teaches 3rd grade, and she has a student right now that she knows is gay.

the kids are already pretty tough on him, and the bad stuff doesn't really get going until 4th grade.

whenever i hear that it's a choice, i always ask (it's usually comes from a man), "when did you decide to like girls?"

[ejp626]

African-American women can call one another "nappy-headed ho's" without meaning it as a real insult ...

Context always matters, but I think you are vastly overestimating the communities even within the Black community where you could get away with this kind of language (even nappy-headed). In my wife's circles, if you say this to someone, you are looking for a real fight. Sure there are ignorant rappers who bring everyone down to their own level, and that is tragic in its own way. But someone in the media as long as Imus has to know the codes and chooses to ignore them, and is now playing dumb.

[Brownian Motion]

I'm glad Imus got axed. The next time a right wing hate monger like limbaugh or coulter crosses the line, there will be precedent for their quick and complete banishnment to the ignominy each so richly deserves.

Edited April 12, 2007 by Brownian Motion

[Noj]

He'll probably slither onto some other airwaves elsewhere.

[Chuck Nessa]

So you know where I'm coming from, I've been an Imus fan for over 20 years. However, lately, he has been getting kind of boring, what with all the politics and the country music, and I didn't listen to him as much lately.

But this is just fucking ridiculous. What he said was wrong but he said things like this for a long time. If you want to say it's all wrong, yes you're right. However, he apologized profusely and he did a lot of good things, helping to build the children's cancer wing for Hackensack Hospital, the Tomorrow's Children Fund and the Ranch for Kids with Cancer.

It's a sad reflection that a moron like Sharpton can assume the mantle of leadership for getting him fired. How about Sharpton apologizing for what he did to the Duke players?

Forgiveness in this country seems to have gone out the window.

We wouldn't be realistic if we didn't acknowledge that all the people he skewered over the years like that idiot Matt Lauer smelled blood in the water and used the opportunity for payback.

Sad day for this country in my opinion.

I echo most of Brad's post with a wish the MFin' Imus stayed on the air, at the same stations to "pay the price" every day for as long as he lives.

I will miss the MSNBC show 5 days a week.