Last month, I wrote about how some newspapers dumped Ann Coulter for making an anti-gay slur. They hired her to be outrageous and obnoxious. But when she did exactly what she was hired to do, with crap that wasn't 1/10 as bad some of filth she got away with previously, they dumped her.
A few seasons ago, ESPN hired Rush Limbaugh to be an 'analyst' on their football studio show. Limbaugh was hired for the sole purpose of being controversial; there were hundreds of guys far more qualified if the main criteria was football knowledge. His job was to liven things up. But when he did exactly that, there was a big flap and ESPN forced him out.
Now, there's a similar flap with radio shock jock Don Imus. He described the players on Rutgers' women's basketball team as a bunch of 'nappy-headed hos' and when watching them, he wondered if it was the women's team or the men's team.
This caused a big flap. The usual suspects, Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, made a big stink about this to make sure they were in the media spotlight. Drugs, violence and broken families are destroying the black community and the only time you here from these self-serving non- (or ex-)leaders is when a white entertainer makes an obnoxious joke. Think Michael Richards.
The thing that befuddled me is that this is being seen as a racial flap, the Rutgers' players being mostly black. To me, the comment was not so much racist as sexist. But then again, if the sexist angle were played up, Jackson and Sharpton couldn't play this up. They are self-styled race activists. We wouldn't want them speaking out against misogyny in the black community or in rap lyrics. That might be... what a responsible leader did.
Imus has been suspended for two weeks and has gone on the media circuit making lame apologies that no one believes are sincere because they know he's being forced to for PR reasons.
Imus is a 'shock jock.' The job for which he was hired was to shock. He did exactly that. He's not called the Aristotle-of-the-airwaves.
Some defenders point out that Imus offends everybody so therefore it's ok.
My point is that Imus offends everybody and that's precisely why it's not ok.
As far as I'm concerned, Don Imus has never been particularly funny. I'm not easily offended but I like clever humor, regardless of the target. I may not necessarily be offended by crude or gratuitous 'humor' or lame cheap shots but I'm not likely to find it entertaining in the least. I've heard Imus a few times. I quickly change the channel.
In addition to being very unentertaining, he adds zilch to the public discourse. It would be one thing if he were making legitimate points that happened to piss some people off because sometimes the truth offends people. But this is different. He's obnoxious for its own sake. That's his schtick. That's his job. He adds nothing. Nor does Coulter. Nor does Limbaugh. Nor does Jim Carville. Nor does Sean Penn, who I saw a few days ago discussing the president's dirty underpants (note to Mr. Madonna: unless you're a porn star, please do not hold a press conference to discuss your fetishes).
My point is not to defend in any way Imus, Coulter, Limbaugh and their ilk, nor to say they should be sent to Gitmo (well maybe Coulter). They were obnoxious long before the particular flaps that got them in special hot water. And spare me the "they're just standing up to political correctness b.s." Just because you're politically incorrect doesn't exempt you for the possibility that you might be a moron who poisons what passes for public discourse in this country.
My point is to attack the media companies is that they hired these loudmouthes in the first place. That these guys were sanctioned for doing exactly what Big Media hired them for is proof not of Imus and company's worthlessness (which speaks for itself), but of the media companies' grotesque hypocrisy. It's ok to make money being offensive, but only when that poison threatens the bottom line does Big Media fake public sensitivity.
On a related note, I've been amused to see a YouTube clip making the rounds of an on-air confrontation between Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera. I think they embody everything that's wrong with the public discourse today. The idea that these two guys had some sort of disagreement was highly amusing.
Geraldo was essentially the godfather of trash TV brought to a nationwide audience and O'Reilly its current emperor. O'Reilly's 'success' wouldn't be possible if not for the path blazed by Geraldo. Though it was funny to see O'Reilly tremble with rage at someone who actually had the lungs to shout him down. I thought they were going to come to blows.
It's sad because Geraldo was once a serious journalist; his TV expose of a Long Island mental institution caused such outrage that New York state's programs for developmentally disabled children were completely revamped. Yet his legacy will be not as Murrow's or Cronkite's successor but of having spawned Bill O'Reilly.
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