Warts and All:

I do not know Imus off the air and have no idea whether he is a good person, any more than I know whether Jerry Lewis, another entertainer who raises millions for sick children, is a good person. But as a listener and sometime guest, I didn’t judge Imus to be a bigot. Perhaps I felt this way in part because Imus vehemently inveighed against racism in real life, most recently in decrying the political ads in last year’s Senate campaign linking a black Tennessee congressman, Harold Ford, to white women. Perhaps I gave Imus a pass because the insults were almost always aimed at people in the public eye, whether politicians, celebrities or journalists — targets with the forums to defend themselves.

And perhaps I was kidding myself. What Imus said about the Rutgers team landed differently, not least because his slur was aimed at young women who had no standing in the world of celebrity, and who had done nothing in public except behave as exemplary student athletes. The spectacle of a media star verbally assaulting them, and with a creepy, dismissive laugh, as if the whole thing were merely a disposable joke, was ugly. You couldn’t watch it without feeling that some kind of crime had been committed. That was true even before the world met his victims. So while I still don’t know whether Imus is a bigot, there was an inhuman contempt in the moment that sounded like hate to me. You can see it and hear it in the video clip in a way that isn’t conveyed by his words alone.

Does that mean he should be silenced? The Rutgers team pointedly never asked for that, and I don’t think the punishment fits the crime. First, as a longtime Imus listener rather than someone who tuned in for the first time last week, I heard not only hate in his wisecrack but also honesty in his repeated vows to learn from it. Second, as a free-speech near-absolutist, I don’t believe that even Mel Gibson, to me an unambiguous anti-Semite, should be deprived of his right to say whatever the hell he wants to say. The answer to his free speech is more free speech — mine and yours. Let Bill O’Reilly talk about “wetbacks” or Rush Limbaugh accuse Michael J. Fox of exaggerating his Parkinson’s symptoms, and let the rest of us answer back.

Liberals are kidding themselves if they think the Imus firing won’t have a potentially chilling effect on comics who push the line. Let’s not forget that Bill Maher, an Imus defender last week, was dropped by FedEx, Sears, ABC affiliates and eventually ABC itself after he broke the P.C. code of 9/11. Conservatives are kidding themselves if they think the Imus execution won’t impede Ann Coulter’s nasty invective on the public airwaves. As Al Franken pointed out to Larry King on Wednesday night, CNN harbors Glenn Beck, who has insinuated that the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, is a terrorist (and who has also declared that “faggot” is nothing more than “a naughty name”). Will Time Warner and its advertisers be called to account? Already in the Imus aftermath, the born-again blogger Tom DeLay has called for the firing of Rosie O’Donnell because of her “hateful” views on Chinese-Americans, conservative Christians and President Bush.

--Frank Rich, 4/15/2007, N.Y. Times

Read the whole thing; it's an honest examination of why pundits like him found the Imus Show to be so appealing, as well as a critical look at the potential long-term ramifications of its cancellation. Atrios thought it worthy of his coveted "Wanker of the Day" award, which is ironic, since lefty bloggers have not exactly been averse to using (or ignoring the use of) racist and sexist invective to attack their targets, whether they be Condaleeza Rice, Michelle Malkin, "Wonkette," or Roman Catholics.

But Rich misses the important point about what happened last week. If it was only Al Sharpton who publicly expressed outrage, the story would have died a quick death, since no one takes Sharpton seriously. It was when Imus' advertisers began pulling out that his fate was sealed. These periodic bloodlettings all occur in a specific context, which makes the ritualistic purging of the bad influence inevitable. Al Campanis wasn't just fired because he made some stupid remarks about black quarterbacking skills and swimming ability; he was canned because over the preceding five years, he had made a series of boneheaded trades (getting almost nothing for Lopes, Cey and Baker, and swapping Sid Fernandez, Jeffrey Leonard, John Franco, Sid Bream and Candy Maldonado for nothing) that had put the team in the second division by the 1987 season. Jimmy the Greek was axed after a series of embarassing incidents, his racial comments only being the last straw.

And in Imus' case, it wasn't the bigotry, which is pretty much par for the course over much of talk radio, that got him in trouble. Imus has underachieved for years in his timeslot, and it was only his ability to attract well-to-do, high end listeners with his political guests that has kept his show on the air. Once it became clear that no viable Democrat could appear on his show, the attractiveness of his show to advertisers disappeared. Cancelling his show became a no-brainer, and it's why Rush Limbaugh doesn't have to worry about being exiled to satellite radio anytime soon.