Pointing out stories you may have missed. Even as news breaks that the Rutgers women’s college basketball team has accepted the apology by axed radio host Don Imus for his sexist and racist comments, Tim Reid of Times Online (see link below) has encapsulated the story in all its angles. This is an edited version of his report.He has called the black tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams “two cooma-chucka, big-butted women”, the African American news anchor Gwen Ifill a “cleaning lady”, and the Palestinians “stinking animals” — and he has always got away with it. Now America’s most famous “shock jock” has been dismissed by CBS and NBC for his racially charged insults against a university women’s basketball team. Don Imus must be asking himself why his latest insult provoked a level of outrage powerful enough to end his career.
Imus, 67, told listeners last Wednesday, after the mostly black Rutgers women’s college basketball team had been beaten in the national championship final against the University of Tennessee: “That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos. That’s some nappy-headed hos there.”
Imus forged his highly successful career on misogyny, racism and homophobia, and everybody — not least the media and political elite who appeared on his show to hawk books and ambitions — knew it. When he insulted the Rutgers team at 6.14am on Wednesday, April 4, there was no reaction — except from Ryan Chiachiere, a 26-year-old researcher for a liberal watchdog, Media Matters for America. His job was to monitor the Imus in the Morning show. He downloaded the comments from the televised transmission of the CBS radio programme, which is aired by the cable television network MSNBC, and posted it on his group’s website. From there it was sent to hundreds of journalists.
Imus dug himself deeper into a hole with an appearance on a radio show hosted by the Rev Al Sharpton. After apologising, he lost his cool by calling his questioners “you people”, a phrase loaded with pejorative racial undertones. A mutiny was setting in at NBC, led by two of the network’s on-air African American stars, Al Roker, a weatherman, and Ron Allen, a reporter. They posted blogs calling for Imus’s dismissal.
By Wednesday morning, as Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist, joined the calls for dismissal, eight leading sponsors of the MSNBC transmission deserted a show that was rapidly become a public relations disaster. The boycott was started by American Express, which is led by Kenneth Chenault, an African-American. Sprint Nextel and General Motors soon followed. On
Wednesday night — a full week after the remarks were made — NBC finally dismissed Imus.
On Thursday CBS faced overwhelming calls for his dismissal. That night Leslie Moonves, the CBS president, announced that Imus had been dismissed. He called it an “important step . . . in changing the culture” of public life.
News source: Times Online.
