Don Imus and the racist 'shock jocks'
Friday, April 20, 2007
By: Ben Becker

Bigotry for sale

On April 12, CBS announced the firing of radio "shock jock" Don Imus, and cancelled his nationally syndicated show "Imus in the Morning." Eight days earlier, Imus had made national headlines when he called the Rutgers University women's basketball team—the runner-up in the collegiate national championship—"nappy-headed hos."

For the week up to the firing, entertainers, politicians, and pundits from across the political spectrum all weighed in on

Don Imus is out of a job because of racist remarks.

Imus. Each commentator condemned the inappropriateness of his remarks, but debated how he should be punished, if at all.

Rev. Al Sharpton pulled no punches, calling Imus a racist and a sexist who should immediately tender his resignation. Rosie O'Donnell, who recently sparked a controversy with her own racist parody of Chinese people, defended Imus's right to free speech—while this time being sure to distance herself from the racist content.

Bill Maher, darling of the liberals, stepped forward as Imus's most strident defender. He called on the nation to accept Imus's belated apology for his "bad joke." Maher referred to Imus affectionately as a once "swaggering mustang" now broken by the people who "just like to get all upset about something" and "distract themselves from the real issues."

This was the most common defense of Imus during the controversy: going "over the line" and "stretching the boundaries" are par for the shock jock course.

Imus’s known history

Imus has made his living based on racist, sexist, and homophobic skits and jokes. Rarely a program has passed without his show’s staff displaying some form of chauvinism. Over the last several years, Imus referred to Arabs repeatedly as "ragheads." The publishers Simon & Schuster were dubbed "thieving Jews"—a phrase which Imus later called "redundant." The words "faggot" and "lesbo" were commonplace.

In 1993, Imus said the following about African American journalism Gwen Ifill: "Isn't The Times wonderful. … It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House."

Contessa Brewer, a former employee on the Imus show was called a "skank" after she left the show.

Imus was restrained compared to his regular guests. As exposed by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, Imus once admitted to bringing sidekick Bernard McGuirk on air essentially to "tell n****r jokes." The show’s sports anchor, Sid Rosenberg, referred to Palestinians as "stinking animals," and suggested the U.S. "drop the bomb right there, kill them all right now."

Imus's compiled team of run-of-the-mill "comedians" and sniveling bigots reminds many of his shock jock colleague and longtime competitor Howard Stern, whose racist and sexist incidents are far too numerous to recount here.

But Imus established himself as a political heavyweight as well, landing his show somewhere in the revolting space between Stern and Rush Limbaugh. 2004 Presidential contender John Kerry appeared on his show, as has Barack Obama, among a long list of political and broadcasting movers and shakers. Most recently, Democratic representative Chris Dodd announced his presidential campaign on Imus's show.

Offering millions of faithful listeners, the chair opposite Imus became a hot seat for anyone with something to sell. Regardless of how his bigotry may have made them squirm on occasion, favorable coverage on "Imus in the Morning" meant access to an important constituency of voters and consumers.

‘I’m not racist—I just say racist things’

Radio shock jocks—who have now migrated into prime time television—use stereotypes every day. But as long as they’re referring generally to Mexicans as "dirtbags" or "drug smugglers," or generally to Black women as "welfare queens"—without saying any particular names—they are let off the hook.

Imus, like Stern and others, has received a litany of fines for inappropriate remarks. Shock jocks generally pay the fine, apologize to anyone who may have been offended, but then denounce the fines as censorship in order to foster their bad boy image and boost ratings. In the end, they are fully compensated with millions of dollars in advertising revenue, which more than makes up for any fines.

In the past, big name guests vowed to never return to Imus's show, only to come back as soon as the public relations storm blew over.

This tolerance of bigotry is rooted in a misconception that language can only be identified as racist, sexist or homophobic if those are the explicit beliefs of the speaker. The broader impact that this language has on the targeted communities, and society as a whole, is considered irrelevant.

In other words, the most terribly offensive stereotypes are excused as long as the speaker claims to have meant nothing by the "bad joke" and reiterates some stock commitment to the principle of equality. This method conveniently shifts the responsibility onto the targeted communities to get over the incident. As Bill Maher said defending Imus, "He's apologized over and over, and if it's not accepted, then it's on the people who won't accept that apology."

Although Imus and his defenders tried to reuse these same tricks, this time the storm refused to blow over. It didn’t matter what Imus said after the fact. It didn’t matter how many apologies he issued, nor did it matter how many Black people he’s shared a meal with throughout his lifetime. What mattered was the impact of his phrase, a vile declaration that conjured up centuries of abuse hurled upon Black women by white men.

Imus picked on the wrong women

Undoubtedly, the public was especially moved to action because Imus’s victims this time were the young Black women of the Rutgers basketball team.

Republican Mike Huckabee made this clear when he said, "What made [Imus's comment] so bad, worse than a

The Rutgers women's basketball team responded to Imus's racist comments at a press conference.

normal kind of thing, was that it was directed at amateur athletes and college students and specific college students."

In other words, the general promotion of racist, sexist, and homophobic stereotypes—Huckabee’s preferred "normal kind of" bigotry—is acceptable because it lacks clear individual victims with whom the broader public empathizes.

This ultimately is why Imus got the axe. He picked on the wrong Black women, and the right wing couldn’t find an angle to rally his defense. With nothing bad to say about the Rutgers women, they resorted to ad hominem attacks on Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and denounced the Black community as a whole for accepting misogyny in mainstream hip-hop.

Still, CBS did not yield to the popular demand for Imus’s dismissal until the advertisers had said their final word. When Staples Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., and other corporate sponsors informed the news channels they were pulling their ads, CBS had nothing left to gain from Imus, and his fate was sealed.

The shock jock phenomenon

Racism and sexism aren’t strangers to the radio. The radio waves have always reflected the broader culture of bigotry in the United States. And since programming developed under the close supervision of the political and business elites, they were sure to filter out potentially progressive and anti-racist voices.

Instead, the radio became home to some of the country’s vilest voices, who not only reflected the bigotry of the broader public, but actively encouraged it. In the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, an open fascist and Nazi supporter, became the country's first talk radio star, broadcasting a weekly message of hate to over 40 million listeners.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights, Black liberation, women’s liberation, and gay liberation movements battled oppression on a variety of fronts. In the realm of culture, they boldly challenged dehumanizing stereotypes that pervaded mainstream radio, television and film. These movements redefined the boundaries of acceptable language. This is the historical and progressive root of what is now often disparaged as "political correctness."

The phenomenon of the shock jock arose in the 1970s as a reaction to these powerful social movements, and by the 1980s, as the radical era decisively closed, the shock jocks exploded onto the scene. Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and Don Imus—the top three on "Talkers" magazine’s list of "The 25 Greatest Radio Talk Show Hosts"—all came to prominence in this particular political context.

The shock jocks provided a valuable outlet to the openly reactionary sectors of society who were challenged by the civil rights movement. Listeners, typically white men, were provided with a guilt-free racist and sexist radio experience. They could maintain a modicum of political correctness at work and at home in front of the kids, but in the morning and afternoon commutes could guiltlessly snicker at the unadulterated sexist, racist, and homophobic bravado of the shock jocks.

As their ratings soared through the roof, breaking all existing radio records, the shock jocks were invited to make the jump into television. And so today we must endure the likes of Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, and Bill O’Reilly—each of whom own their own list of bigoted remarks no less inflammatory than Imus’s.

Mike Huckabee spoke more truth than he knew when he said, "If Imus is going to get fired, then there's a lot of other people that need to go out the door. … Gosh, half of talk radio and television has to go."

We know that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

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