UPDATED: April 25, 2007  

 “ON THE IMUS CONTROVERSY, PART 1” 

I’ll admit it.  I’ve been an Imus fan from way back, way back when, in the 1970s, he was making fun of the Christian Right on national radio long before anyone else did (and few do now).  In recent years I have admired him for being the only nationally syndicated radio talk show host this side of Air America Radio who consistently has taken on the Bush Administration on a whole host of issues (and he was doing it well before Air America Radio came into existence).  I have admired him for consistently having at least Democratic politicians and liberal journalists as guests on his program without worrying about “balance” by having lots of right-wingers.  (No true left-wingers of course, but then no one other than Air America Radio, Pacifica, and etc. does that.)   I have admired him for his charitable work, across all ethnicities, when I can think of no other nationally syndicated radio talk show host who does anything like it.  I have admired him for taking up causes like the privately funded veterans rehab. hospital in San Antonio and for strongly and repeatedly supporting the significant increase in the death benefit for the widows of service people killed in Iraq recently enacted.   

I have been repeatedly aghast at the egregious and gratuitous racism regularly expressed by his in-house rednecks, Bernard McGuirk (not heard from at all in the week of apologies before the firing) and Sid Rosenberg (who was at least let go a while back but who had recently sort of crept back in).  Imus would often chime in, as with the last most distasteful one about the Rutgers women, and would never condemn the bigots or the bigotry.  I have frequently wondered how he squared this totally tasteless and totally damaging giving in to a broad element of our culture, in which “black” jokes are not only tolerated but perpetuated, with his obvious liberal politics on other issues. 

For example, he is strongly and unreservedly against the War on Iraq, is a consistent Bush critic on many other issues, and has regularly characterized Cheney as a war criminal.  He voted for Kerry in 2004, as he told us repeatedly before the election and since.  He also strongly supported Harold Ford, Jr. in his 2006 Tennessee Senate race.  Ford is a conservative Democrat to be sure, but he is also an African-American (who happened to know damn well about the regular racist humor on Imus in the Morning, appeared anyway and to my knowledge never said anything about it, on the air at least).  Imus has said more than once that the disgraceful response of Bush’s Federal government to Katrina had everything to with race (while he did, most unfortunately, make fun of Mayor Nagin of New Orleans at the same time).  I don’t know how he squared his broadly liberal politics with this sort of thing and with his friendship and support for the right-winger Sen. John McCain and the further-to-the-right former Sen. Rick Santorum.  But then show me anyone, including myself and the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton, who is entirely consistent, and I will show you a very unusual person. 

Is what Imus said excusable?  No.  Absolutely not.  It was horrible, reprehensible, disgraceful, hurtful.  And while it took him a couple of days to recognize that fact he eventually did, and has said so over and over again.  He also pledged that should he be permitted to stay on the air (on radio he had a much wider audience than he had on MSNBC) he would do a complete makeover of his show, in terms of its content, the issues he addresses, who staffs it, and who appears regularly on it.   Imus’ friend James Carville revealed just how shallow and pandering he is by telling Imus that context doesn’t count in this matter.  But oh yes it does Mr. Carville.  And it is, whether or not you were thinking about the big pile of cow patties your friend Hillary Clinton was about to step into with her rapper fund raising history.   Too bad that we on the Left did wake up quickly enough and smell the roses here.  More on that opportunity missed next week    

But for now, just think about the words not mentioned (at least I haven’t heard them and I have listened to a lot of air on this one): Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, O’Reilly, Savage, Beck, Levin, the Fox “News” Channel, WABC New York and all of the other local radio stations who give air to all of the above and their right-wing clones, as well as the words MSNBC and CBS.   They knew very well about Imus’ racist shtick.  They went along with it for years, most likely because they knew that it pulled in listeners.  They did so right up until the Sharpton-Jackson tag team made Imus too hot for them to handle.   

How about the words homophobia, misogyny when it comes to women’s control over their own bodies, xenophobia, Islamophobia, liberal-phobia, religious bigotry, and absolute hatred of anyone who holds views at all different from the above.  I did not hear them mentioned in this context.  These are all over right-wing hate radio all over the country, 24/7.  And how about the words “Republican Party?” It openly and covertly rides on the backs of all of the above flacks in the Privatized Ministry of Propaganda (PMoP) who promote them.  It openly or covertly rides on the backs of all of the above issues, starting of course with the racism which these people spout every day.  Of course with great cleverness they do it covertly with code words, so that no one can ever, or could ever you can be sure, “Imus” them.  These are the real political issues of race, prejudice and the fomenting of hatred in the media: the existence of the PMoP with its direct, hardly hidden in fact widely promoted, links with the Republican Party, its national platform, and its national leadership. 

If losing Imus we lost the only nationally syndicated, mainstream radio talk show host who can be characterized as a liberal politically.  If losing Imus we lost the only national syndicated radio talk show host who would and could and did recognize that he did something completely wrong and reprehensible, and indeed has done so for years even while pledging previously to stop it.  In losing Imus we lost the only one of them who could pledge to change now at least and who we can monitor.  Can you imagine Limbaugh, or Hannity, or Coulter or O’Reilly either admitting that they were ever wrong on such issues or pledging to take on the issue of racism head on?  Take Coulter, for example.  Recall how she responded to the (short-lived) outrage over her political homophobia, and recall that Coulter has characterized all liberals as treasonous, a charge that carries the death sentence, with no whimpers of protest appearing anywhere.  And she is surely still on the air.  Then consider how Limbaugh defended himself over the Michael J. Fox outrage, and continues to do so.  No apologies there. 

It is the ultimate in irony that Imus was the target of a clearly ex post facto application of the “law.”  He had been doing this stuff for years.  Clarence Page of CNN called him on it about six years ago and he promised to reform.  He never did.  But Sharpton and Jackson didn’t, to my knowledge.  CBS and MSNBC never did either, to my knowledge.  And none of his liberal interviewees who I have heard talk about their time with him over the years have said that they ever raised the issue with him.  Jon Meacham, the Editor of Newsweek which last week ran a cover story on the whole episode, has appeared as a guest for years, as have liberal Newsweek journalists.  Meacham said that during the tumult many African-American employees came to him to tell him how upset they had been with him for years for appearing on the show.  A measure of how deep institutional racism runs in our country is the likely fact that none of these journalists came to Meacham before the incident because they were likely concerned about what so doing might mean for their own employment. So how was Imus to know that out of the blue there would ever be a “one too many” and he would be gone?  Over the centuries in this country how many blacks have suffered from that kind of ex post facto “justice”?  Emmett Till, a 14 year-old murdered for whistling at a white woman, comes to mind. 

Next week I will consider what Imus might have done, should he have remained on the air, and how in my view, the left missed a huge opportunity to fight the real fight against the real racism.  That racism is of course white racism, not the totally disgusting, totally off the wall, but still almost totally back hip-hop/rap culture which has become such a convenient target for both the Imus defenders of the racist ilk and many of his liberal critics as well.

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