U.S. talk radio knob Don Imus got canned Wednesday for his disparaging remarks about black players on the Rutgers womens' basketball team. The NYT's David Carr looks at how today's news media realities doomed Imus (who should have been doomed in any event).
OLD MEETS NEW Mr. Imus is an old-school radio guy caught in a very modern media paradigm. When he started 30 years ago, if he made the same kind of remark, it would have floated off into the ether — the Federal Communications Commission, if it received complaints, might have taken notice, but few others.
But radio is now visible — Mr. Imus’s show was simulcast on MSNBC, and more to the point, it is downloadable. By Friday, reporters and advocates could click up the remark on the Media Matters for America Web site, and later YouTube, and see a vicious racial insult that delighted him visibly as it rolled off his tongue. The ether now has a memory.
IDLE HANDS An awareness of Mr. Imus’s “nappy-headed hos” remark grew on Friday, just as editors and reporters in both print and broadcast were staring down Good Friday and Easter. Filling up post-holiday reports is always a chore and there stood Mr. Imus, backpedaling and apologizing to anyone who would listen. The media apparatus, at loose ends, kicked in with a vengeance.
AN A-LIST MOMENT Most of the time when shock jocks step over the line, they are surrounded by a cadre of faceless enablers. Mr. Imus, because of his manifest interests, played host to the cream of journalism and politics. He may not have the biggest numbers in broadcasting, but his ability to book the likes of Senator John McCain and Tim Russert of NBC News means that he became a far worthier target. When most radio talkers go off the rails, the only question is whether advertisers will pull back. In this instance, his guests were implicated; whether they would return to the show became an issue of public moment.
THE WRONG VICTIMS Speaking of targets, Mr. Imus chose poorly. “Imus has a long history of saying far more negative, divisive things,” said Robert M. Entman, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “In this case, he chose a college basketball team. College athletics is sacred in our culture in a way. We tell ourselves that it is a place that we have transcended race. This was an attack on the purity of sport, student athletes who are not paid to perform. In picking on a whole team, he chose the wrong noun to go with the adjectives.”
He also picked on the wrong coach. C. Vivian Stringer protects her posse; her eloquent, aggressive defense of the team — and the obvious class of the players at the podium — made for riveting television with a great deal of emotional content. The Rutgers institutional decision to treat the affair as a teachable moment put Mr. Imus in an even deeper hole. ...
A SPANKING MACHINE WITH NO EXIT Time heals, time forgets, but Mr. Imus was seeking to shore up his career immediately. Mr. Imus never caught a breath because he was in the middle of a 24-hour news cycle that kept him in the cross hairs. It is the kind of media ceremony that generally ends in a human sacrifice.