Political Correctness: Make a Judgment

Who are the real culprits?
In addition to the Women's basketball team, it was the African-American men and women in the Media and across the country who spoke out against Don Imus' racist denigration of women that made the difference. They were more important than the self-serving political agenda of passe Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who rushed to get at the front of the outrage parade.

I'm a free speech advocate, but Don Imus made a terrible mistake, putting himself in the red hot position of being the scapegoat for the profiteers in the music industry, which includes a lot of the big name corporations. Imus was right in saying the terms he used originated in the Black Community and Hip Hop-Gangster rap performers. It was sad to see a man in his sixties resorting to using female denigration song lyrics produced by stupid teenage boys and men who should know better, both Black and White, chasing the big bucks through millions of sales to other stupid teenagers. These big corporations are the real villains because their only interests are profits regardless of the damage they do to our social fabric.

And speaking of those "American values"? The American profiteers are already cashing in. I found this on the Drudge Report.



THIS LINK TAKES YOU TO THE GOOGLE MERCHANDISE

While People Are Being Fired For Racist Remarks...
How can we forget this knee-slapper from Bill O'Reilly on the February 6, 2003 edition of The Factor?

"We'd save lives because Mexican wetbacks, whatever you want to call them, the coyotes--they're not going to do what they're doing now, all right, so people aren't going to die in the desert."
Whatever you want to call them, Bill. Fair.org reports:

"the Allentown, Pa. Morning Call (1/5/03) had O'Reilly using the same racist term in a speech earlier in the year: "O'Reilly criticized the Immigration and Naturalization Service for not doing its job and not keeping out 'the wetbacks.'"
And two months later Bill O'Reilly was hosting a charity event for urban school children. An African-American singing group called "The Best Men" were schedule to perform, but were late. O'Reilly said to the audience:

"Does anyone know where the Best Men are? I hope they're not in the parking lot stealing our hubcaps."
So while television executives are busy firing people, well, you know... It's only fair.

How about putting O'Reilly's remarks in context instead of the FAIR interpretation as FAIR is frequently quite unfair (and inaccurate) in how it spins things too. Meanwhile I can find nothing re this on any of the internet fact check sites, Fox, or CNBC.

As everybody knows I am challenged when it comes to Googling skills, I'm sure you will do better if there is something as damning as you claim.

Here is a really good essay on the whole IMUS thing and it doesn't quite answer but does address Thomas's "Why now?" question. It's too long to post in its entirety and to attempt to exerpt it would diminish the message:

The Imus Fallout: Who Can Say What?
Thursday, Apr. 12, 2007
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK
TIME - CNN

Why are we belaboring the obvious?

There are groups who cannot be impugned in any way. Anyone in the public sphere proceeds at his or own peril.

You may not denigrate-African-Americans; gays or radical feminists.

However, you may savage Jews( See Borat); entrepreneurs (See Wall Street); Italian-Americans (See "Sopranos") White Southerners (See hundreds of movies made in the last twenty years.

It is incredible that, six years after 9/11, Hollywood has produced only a fraction of the "propaganda" movies against the "enemy" they dutifully filmed even before we went to war with Nazi Germany and Japan in 1941.

Have I missed the movies showing the Iraqi extremists chopping off the heads of "infidel" captives?

The politically correct mantra was expressed, forcefully, by Becky Thompson, a sociology and women's studies professor, in a teaching manual distrbuted by the American Sociological Association stating:

"I begin my course with the basic feminist principle that in a racist, classist, and sexist society we all have swallowed oppressive ways of being, whether intentionally or not. Specifically, this means that it is not
open to debate whether a white student is racist or a male student is sexist. He simply is."

I wonder what she would say about the continual denigration of Italian-Americans by the malevolent series--"The Sopranos"?

Perhaps, Fox, you could explain to us in what context it would be acceptable for O'Really to use the term "wetback," or to suggest that it is reasonable to assume that black people would naturally steal hubcaps?

O'Really is an ignorant rabblerouser who has one tenth of the brains of Barack Obama and none of the charisma.

Welcome to A2K, Orilione.

I can't work with "wetback", Set, but the hubcap thing is easy enough if you remember the Celebrity Roasts. :wink:

While this administration is continuously eroding the rights of American citizens, this uproar only adds to our loss. Freedom of Speech is far too precious to let it fall by the wayside because of some cur shouting out his dirty opinions. I would support Don Imus all the way to the Supreme Court for his right to say anything at all on his show, as long as he hadn't broken a law and on this I'm not certain. Would the quote be considered libelous or slanderous? I certainly consider it to be so, but I'm not certain of the law. If the remarks are legally considered slander, then he should be gone. But as others have pointed out, there have been so many slurs by so many shock jocks that it seems ludacris, pun intended, to suddenly pick on Imus.

If life were fair, no one would say such awful things about anyone, but life isn't fair. For people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to get on their self-righteous high horses is blatant hypocrisy. Hopefully, they will start coming down on the rappers who have made millions on that same derogatory, racist and sexist language.

It would be wonderful if they all would agree to not aim their remarks toward people who have done nothing to deserve them, such as the Rutgers team or any person or group who is not making money or gaining power from being in the public eye. The talk about the Rutgers team is true, they are talented scholar athletes; but any young person, regardless of his or her background or mental ability, should never be subjected to that kind of mean-spirited language, spewed from the mouths of the most salacious jerks on the air.

To me, anyone who is a celebrity or who is in politics is fair game. If they aren't tough enough to take mindless insults, they shouldn't be out there in the limelight. Young people who are just trying their best should certainly be on a "Do Not Disturb" list aimed at these arrogant loud mouths. That would be ideal, but when has anything in life been ideal?

My ambivalence is showing…I hate what was said, yet I feel obligated to protect freedom of speech even when it is filled with idiotic, demeaning, racial references that do nothing but show the filth that lives in the minds of these loud mouths.

What I do agree with is O'Bill. The money spoke, not the public. If the companies that buy ads had not pulled out, Imus would still be selling his form of "entertainment" on television and radio, believe me, the execs would have found a reason to keep Imus. Regardless of the president of NBC saying that money did not enter into their decision, only outrage at the insults directed toward the Rutgers team, nothing he could do would ever disguise the hypocrisy dripping from his lips.

Maybe it is time to start paying attention to Iraq again and to the "surge" of blood pumping from soldiers and citizens of Iraq.

I don't follow your objection, Di. He lost his job, not his rights.

I know this is five pages back but by the time I read them I'll have moved on with more points to think about.
I agree with Beth here.

I'm personally more fraught by the hysteria aspect of all this, having paid attention to the McCarthy hearings at the time, than by any great harm done to the Rutgers team, though I also sympathize with them. Still agreeing with a lot of Squinney's well expressed posts. Actually, I've seen a lot of well expressed posts on different sides of the issues here, they've been useful.

O'Bill, you're right, he didn't lose his rights, but the fact that he was fired will likely make freedom of speech just a little bit less free. I know, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it erodes that freedom for all of us if it becomes impossible to say anything that is politically incorrect without fear of being fired from your job, especially for those of us who have never been in a position of power, which Imus enjoyed for so many years.

(I'm not good at debate and don't write especially well, so please feel free to disagree or argue, it'll help me get better).

I do disagree, you do write well.

Embarrassingly, I even find myself agreeing with what Blatham says in other threads. The government isn't the only body in society that can violate rights. In this case, the government wasn't the one who chills free speech. It was employers and customers. If this case had been pursued through the legal process, Al Sharpton, Jane Kilpatrick, and the pressure groups behind them would have lost the case in a microsecond because they have standing. The only people who had standing to tell NBC/CBS to sack Imus was the Rutgers team itself, which barely said anything in the matter. If "these young women were victimized" (Al Sharpton), they didn't seem to have noticed until reporters told them so.

Imus's remarks were tasteless. But seeing a self-appointed sensitivity police ruin someone because he said things they didn't like to hear -- that's scary. Even if no legal rights were violated in the process.

You see "a self-appointed sensitivity police ruin(ing) someone", I see a man who has had the ears of kings and leaders lose his soapbox because of his own racist, sexist mouth. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. One can see both phenomena at the same time.

Media inured to subtler smears, pervasive sexism
Media Matters for America
4/13/07

Don't think twice: Media inured to subtler smears, pervasive sexism

Now that MSNBC and CBS Radio have both dropped Don Imus, and the Rutgers basketball team has accepted his apology, Imus himself is no longer the most interesting thing about the controversy he touched off with his racist and sexist comments about the team -- if he ever was, that is.

One of the more interesting aspects of the controversy is whether (and why) Imus' guests -- some of the most influential and respected journalists and public figures in America among them -- have, by their appearances on his show, tacitly endorsed his behavior. Time.com Washington editor Ana Marie Cox, a frequent Imus guest, explained this week how she came to overlook the "casual locker-room misogyny" of Imus' show:

As the invites kept coming, I found myself succumbing to the clubhouse mentality that Imus both inspires and cultivates. Sure, I cringed at his and his crew's race-baiting (the Ray Nagin impersonations, the Obama jokes) and at the casual locker-room misogyny (Hillary Clinton's a "bitch," CNN news anchor Paula Zahn is a "wrinkled old prune"), but I told myself that going on the show meant something beyond inflating my precious ego. I wasn't alone. As Frank Rich noted a few years ago, "It's the only show ... that I've been on where you can actually talk in an informed way -- not in sound bites." Yeah, what he said!

My giving up the show, I acknowledge, is too little and too late. I doubt that I'll be missed. It's depressingly easy to find female journalists who will tolerate or ignore bigotry if it means getting into the boys' club someday. (If only I were the only one.)

To her credit, Cox announced she would no longer appear on Imus' show, writing, "I'm embarrassed to admit that it took Imus' saying something so devastatingly crass to make me realize that there just was no reason beyond ego to play along."

One quibble with Cox's account: As she surely knows, it's depressingly easy to find male journalists who tolerate or ignore bigotry, too.

Imus' comments, though shocking and unusually blunt, are also a reminder that bigoted and hurtful commentary is all too common in even the most reputable mass media outlets.

The reference to "bigoted and hurtful commentary," rather than to "bigots," is intentional. As Geoffrey Nunberg has explained, it is the commentary itself, not the speaker, that matters:

Imus's beliefs and character are completely irrelevant here. When a white person calls somebody a nigger or describes a women's basketball team as nappy-headed hos, he or she has committed a racist act. As with redskin, the words trail their own sordid history behind them, and their power to hurt is independent of the intentions of the person who utters them. And my own view is that the broadcast media should have a zero-tolerance approach to this kind of language -- "use an epithet, you're out of here." To do anything less is to implicitly sanction a racist act.

And, like Imus, other media figures have a long history of comments that any reasonable person would understand carry the "power to hurt," as Media Matters has detailed:

CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck, also a "regular commentator" for ABC's Good Morning America, has called Hillary Clinton "the stereotypical bitch" and Rosie O'Donnell a "fat witch" with "blubber ... just pouring out of her eyes." He has referred to Katrina survivors as "scumbags" and declared that "I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims." He has also said on-air that he was "thinking about killing Michael Moore" and told the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, "what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.' "

Syndicated radio host Neal Boortz has claimed that "at its core," Islam is a "violent, violent religion," and said, "[T]his Muhammad guy is just a phony rag-picker." Boortz asserted that "t is perfectly legitimate, perhaps even praiseworthy, to recognize Islam as a religion of vicious, violent, bloodthirsty cretins." Boortz also described then-Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), who is African American, as looking "like a ghetto slut," like "an explosion at a Brillo pad factory," like "Tina Turner peeing on an electric fence," and like "a shih tzu."

Bill O'Reilly told a Jewish caller to his radio show "if you are really offended, you gotta go to Israel." O'Reilly routinely makes sexually suggestive comments about his radio co-host, Lis Wiehl, including his suggestion that she might want to learn to become a stripper, to which he added, "You're a good-looking girl. I mean, if you haven't seen Lis on TV, she's a good-looking blonde."

Michael Savage, who lost his own MSNBC show after he told a caller he hoped he would "get AIDS and die," recently called Barbara Walters a "double-talking slut" and said of Melissa Etheridge, "I don't like a woman married to a woman. It makes me want to puke." He also told listeners that gay people "threaten your very survival" and said that the "average prostitute" is "more reliable and more honest than most U.S. senators wearing a dress."

And Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter ... well, they are Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. If they aren't insulting women or minorities, they're probably asleep.

Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, Boortz, and others regularly make bigoted comments not unlike those that cost Don Imus his job. And those comments, regardless of their intent, carry the power to hurt, as Nunberg explained -- and lack any redeeming value to offset the pain they can cause.

But these statements not only insult and hurt those they directly and indirectly smear. They also make other troubling comments seem tame by comparison, to the point that most people don't even blink when mainstream journalists make casual, offhand comments with deeply sexist or racist implications.

With Rush Limbaugh ranting about "femi-Nazis" and Don Imus calling people "hos" and Ann Coulter calling people "faggots," few speak out when three seperate CNN reporters -- including Emmy Award winners Wolf Blitzer and Tom Foreman -- describe the first woman to serve as speaker of the House of Representatives by referring to the Girls Gone Wild video series.

Or when Chris Matthews compares Hillary Clinton to a stripper and refers to her as an "uppity" woman. Or when he says she looks "witchy." Or when he regularly asserts that "Midwest guys" are "not up to modern women as president" -- an assertion which, given his other comments about Clinton, one can only assume is a classic case of projection.

Or when countless mainstream journalists dismissively refer to John Edwards as the "Breck Girl." Forget for a moment the propriety of journalists' repeating GOP talking points in order to derisively describe a Democratic presidential candidate. What do these journalists imply about women when they use "girl" as a pejorative description?

And when the likes of Limbaugh and Imus have used words like "bitch" and "femi-Nazi" so much that mainstream journalists -- male and female -- consider it perfectly acceptable to use the word "girl" as an insult, who even notices more subtle problems, like Charlie Gibson asking Hillary Clinton if she "would ... be in this position were it not for your husband?" A perfectly reasonable question -- except that it's a question that could just as easily be asked of, say, John McCain, whose path to Congress (and, thus, a presidential run) was paved by his marriage to a wealthy and politically connected woman. It's a question that could just as easily be asked of McCain -- but it isn't.

And then there's the matter of who the media turn to for interviews, analysis, and commentary. As Adele Stan has noted at Tapped this week, even as cable news programs have devoted extensive coverage to Imus' racist and sexist comments, they have often done so without the benefit of women among their panelists. Stan described the panels MSNBC hosted to discuss their decision to dump Imus:

[F]or the rest of the night, MSNBC show hosts discussed the channel's decision with panel after panel of experts, populated, with one exception, entirely by men. (Thank goodness that Joe Scarborough likes to fight with Salon.com's indomitable Joan Walsh or, out of a total of about a dozen commentators, there would have been no women featured on Imus segments of the cable channel's three major evening shows: "Hardball," "Countdown," and "Scarborough Country.") And while the producers did a pretty good job maintaining a racial mix on the panels, they apparently couldn't find a single African-American woman to comment on Imus's firing -- despite the fact that, just miles from MSNBC headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey, New Jersey NOW staged a rally that was led by African-American leaders in the women's movement. Until more women hold major positions of behind-the-scenes power in mainstream media, things will likely remain as they are: a bunch of guys debating whether or not another guy who verbally assaulted a group of women in a sexualized manner deserves to be fired for having done so.

(Full disclosure: Stan previously worked for Media Matters for America.)

In the midst of a torrent of comments about "femi-Nazis" and "bitches" and "hos," these more subtle problems are rarely even noticed, and even more rarely discussed among the media elite and those who appear on their shows.

And that may be the most damaging effect of the kind of commentary that we routinely hear from the likes of Imus and Limbaugh and Coulter: Rhetoric that should be unacceptable becomes merely outrageous; that which should be outrageous becomes merely controversial; and that which should be controversial is barely noticed, if at all.

That's why we at Media Matters hope the Imus incident prompts the nation's media -- both individual journalists and the organizations that employ them -- to consider whether they can and should be more responsible in their role as stewards of the national discourse.

Not just Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and the people who enable them. Charlie Gibson and Wolf Blitzer and Maureen Dowd (one of the foremost practitioners of the "Breck Girl" insult) and the bookers and producers who assemble woman-free panels to discuss sexist comments and countless others who, intentionally or otherwise, write and say things that, in ways large and small, have the power to hurt.

As Media Matters president and CEO David Brock said in response to Imus' firing: "It is our hope that this incident will begin a broader conversation about the responsibility that news corporations, journalists, and media figures have to the American public. This is an opportunity for the media to truly raise the bar to a higher standard and return to the fundamentals of journalism."

Dang tootin.

I consider this a ridiculous remark--and i would ascribe that to you not having thought through the ramifications of the contention.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas both campaigned for the United States Senate in Illinois. In those days, Senators were usually appointed by the state legislatures, rather than being popularly elected. The Democratic Party remained the largest, most well-organized and most effective political party in the nation--however, it's main support was in the American South. Douglas and Lincoln, then, were campaigning to, essentially, help their respective parties gain control of the state legislature. They had a series of seven public debates, and Lincoln hammered on the issue of slavery. In the event, the Republicans did not gain control of the legislature, and Douglas was returned to the Senate, but that was more a result of the fact that the Republicans were a new party, and could not capture the legislature from the Democrats.

But the days of Douglas' political career were numbered. When Douglas stood for the party's Presidential nomination in 1860, although he was able to successfully manipulate the convention to give him the nomination, the party was fatally split. John Breckenridge, formerly the Vice President, ran against Douglas and Lincoln, and although both Lincoln and Douglas polled more votes, his solid support in slave states placed him second in the Electoral College.

Douglas tried mightily hard to dodge the bullet of slavery which Lincoln consistently aimed at him in the 1858 debates, because he well understood the need to keep the party united if he were to win the 1860 Presidential election. At Galesburg, Illinois, he stated that the authors of the Declaration of Independence never intended to grant political equality to the negroes, but that the government had been made by white men, for white men and their posterity forever. But at Freeport, Lincoln backed him into a rhetorical corner, and he was obliged to concede that a territorial or state legislature could ban slavery. This became known as the Freeport Doctrine, even though he had already made this point the year before (which was how Lincoln was able to force him to restate the principle).

Southerners could not have found a more sympathetic Northerner to represent them in the White House. This was especially true as his performance in the 1858 Senatorial campaign in Illinois, despite the fatal terms of the debates in which Lincoln hammered him with the slavery issue--because he managed to appeal in public opinion to elements of the Democratic Party both North and South. Northern Democrats heard only the Freeport Doctrine; poor whites in the South heard only the Galesburg declaration bout a government by and for white men. As a Senator, Douglas had shown a sublime skill at writing and editing legislation which allowed the passage of bills on the issue of slavery in the states which was odious to many Northerners.

However, the "hype" of the so-called Freeport Doctrine, which had gone virtually unnoticed in the South in 1857 before it had been brought up at Freeport, proved fatal for him in 1858, when newspaper editors seized upon it--either to prove that Douglas was unacceptable as a northern candidate because he was "soft" on slavery, or as a candidate for the South because he failed to support slavery. Lincoln was elected in 1860 because the Democratic Party split--although without the hype surrounding the so-called Freeport Doctrine, without the party being split, he would have buried Lincoln in a popular and an Electoral College landslide.

That election, of course, lead inevitably to the American Civil War. During that war, an Irish immigrant named Patrick Cleburne was the most competent division commander in the Army of the Tennessee, then commanded by Braxton Bragg, who was arguably the most incompetent high-ranking Confederate officer in a pantheon of stunningly incompetent commanders. He (Cleburne) was such an effective commander, that even Federal commanders admitted that their troops dreaded to see his blue battle flag across the line from them. In 1864, Cleburne advocated offering manumission to any black men who would enlist in the Confederate States Army. His career--which would likely have taken him to Lieutenant General or even full General, and which would have provided the CSA with a competent general officer at a time when they had few and desperately needed them--was effectively over. His proposal met such hostility, that even the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, felt moved to respond, and he issue a formal order that the proposal be suppressed. He (Cleburne) was not dismissed--they needed him too much. But he would never again be promoted, and Bragg, Joe Johnston and John Bell Hood, who successively commanded the Army of the Tennessee, never trusted him, and never gave him higher responsibilities nor independent command.

I have chosen those two examples for precisely the reason that the two men mentioned were pilloried in the press for expressing opinions odious to the supporters of slavery. I could, with very little thought, come up with many more examples in history when people were brought to grief for the public perception of their beliefs, as retailed in the popular press. I'd like to know what you would suggest be done to assure that no one were ever subject to the "sensitivity police." I can think of no solution to what you here identify as a problem which would not be scarier by far than the thought that someone's career is ruined because of the public perception of them, as fueled by the popular press. That is, after all, a risk which all public men and women always run, and i suspect that they all know it.

I have no solution, so I can't suggest anything that could be done about it. But just because I don't have a solution, that doesn't make it ridiculous to say there's a problem.