Likelihood of Success

I mus’ admit, I’m enjoying this

Apr 7, 2007 Americana, Medialites

Enjoying this? Yes I am — Don Imus is in trouble for using a wildly inappropriate description of the Rutgers women’s basketball team.

I’ve been amused but mostly annoyed by Don Imus since forever. What I love here is how he, a central cog in the Narcissistic Media complex I just wrote about, has stepped on the third rail of American media behavior: Racist terminology. Imus, a fairly moderate liberal who does not consider himself one, loves to make fun of the “Nazi” Rush Limbaugh and in general takes a pretty morally superior tone on the politics of race. He counts among his radio friends various prominent black politicians such as J.C. Watts and Harold Ford, Jr. On the other hand he has, over the years, been fairly merciless with less respectable figures, brutally parodying race-clown Al Sharpton and joking about his continued refusals to “have lunch” with Jesse Jackson, and has not toed the line on the Great Light Hope, Barack Obama.Racial humor is a constant on Imus’s show, and he gets away with a lot. Last December Imus, a gazzillionaire, said that CBS was run by “money-grubbing Jews,” but that story had no legs because, despite our dominant control of the international media — we let guys like Imus say stuff like this just to keep the “look” honest — no one but people who get paid to care really cares what people say about the Jews, especially things that are, if rough-hewn, basically true. But pretty much every ethnic group is brutalized on Imus’s program sooner or later, and it isn’t always pretty, though it is often (not always) funny.

Imus gets a pass on this stuff, by and large, however, because he is friends with influential media figures, makes money for his media syndicate and — here is the kicker — because he isn’t really a racist according to any useful definition. Merely trafficking in racial stereotypes, in my book, is not within such a definition. The schadenfreud here, however, is that Imus thinks nothing of accusing conservative figures such as Limbaugh with the brush of not only racism but vicious hatred — quite unjustifiably — even as he walks the political correctness line and opens his studio to Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan, who Imus undoubtedly cannot stand, but who is a right-wing antiwar voice that Imus wants heard.

Has he crossed that magic line this time? I doubt it. Al Sharpton’s “demands” for Imus’s resignation are not much of a threat. A little bit of nasty name-calling is a far cry from the sort of thing that ended Doug “Greaseman” Tracht’s career a few years ago, when he was fired for this beaut:

Noting that the Grammy ceremony was scheduled for that evening, he played a portion of a song by Lauryn Hill, who later won five Grammy Awards.

Then he commented, “No wonder people drag them behind trucks.” The reference was to the murder of James Byrd Jr., a Black man decapitated when he was dragged behind a pick-up truck in Jasper, TX.

That’s unacceptable, and Tracht paid a high price. Imus’s impolitic crack was nowhere near this, which of course is a negative proof — but Imus will weather this storm, as he has quite a few. Will we be any worse off if he reigns in some of the racial humor on his show? No, and getting his knuckles rapped is good for him, and us too. And the mere fact that he’s feeling a little PC heat — why, that I love.

UPDATE:  At the end of the day, though, it’s really all about Keith Olbermann.