Why are there no posts, for or agianst Don Imus?

From Al Roker)

There is no joy in what has transpired over the last week. From the utterance of those foul, vile words to the dropping of Don Imus' program on MSNBC, this has been extremely difficult.

As someone who called for the dropping of his show, I take no personal satisfaction in the Imus program's removal.
I am proud of the courage our president of NBC News, Steve Capus, has shown in making this difficult decision. I'm gratified by the hundreds of e-mails I've received thanking me for my stance. And I appreciated the other hundreds of e-mails I got that were less than complimentary. Why?

A line has been drawn as to what is acceptable and what will not be tolerated. A dialog has been started about race in our country. An opportunity has been created to start holding responsible those who produce and broadcast offensive music lyrics, both rap and rock, that denigrate and marginalize women.

We can use this time to really look at ourselves and dig deep to create a world that our children will be proud to inherit. Diversity, inclusion and acceptance are great goals to strive for.

For all those who think this punishment is too harsh, consider having to explain to your daughter why someone would call a person they didn't know, a "nappy headed ho". And by the way, for all those people who posit that the phrase is rooted in the black community, it is not. My childhood neighborhood of St. Albans, Queens, is a middle-class neighborhood. People keep their homes neat and their lawns mowed. I never heard the word "ho" in my neighborhood or in my parents' home. To this day, when I go back to take my kids to see their grandmother, there aren't young black men on the corner calling women "hos".

In the end, this is not about Don Imus or his producer, Bernard McGuirk, who often set the ugly and hateful tone of the "comedy" bits they produced. The ten young women of the Rutgers Women's basketball team showed how unjust and wrong the humor of the Imus program is. Mr. Imus says he's a good person who said a bad thing. That may be true. Certainly his charity work speaks to that. But just as he wants to be judged on what he does, he must also be judged on what he says and what he has said, both on and off the air. Mr. McGuirk contends he's not a racist, even though he spews racist invective because, in his words, he grew up around black people. Hmmm. So did Strom Thurmond.

It takes no courage for a corporation to protect its bottom line; that's simply what corporations do.

As for starting a dialogue about race, this affair will be a fading echo in the months to come and largely forgotten this time next year.

edgarblythe, the dialog about race has been going on for decades at least. As far as the network doing something noble to fire Imus, I am not very convinced about their nobility, as they knew what kind of a guy and the kind of show Imus conducted for years.

Duh. Oh. Thanks.

Well, duh, you posted an article proclaiming a dialog about race had just been started with this Imus thing.

The dialog lags or gets sidetracked from time to time. This bit of new stimulation has folks talking who were silent a few days ago.

Agreed, but one observation of mine is that some of this amounts to nothing more than picking at the scabs and wounds of the past, and that is what racists do, both black and white. If its honest dialog, fine, but often sometimes it would be best for most of us to forget it and chalk it up to people that simply have very bad taste, which includes Imus. Why do we have to re-invent the wheel over and over? The guy should have been removed a long time ago. Perhaps he never said the latest quote, but his show was laced with bad taste for long time. Imus was more than about race. He was about very bad taste and just a sick individual.

The dialog has been shifted to all color spectrums. See Snood's excellent thread on Physician, Heal Thy Damn Self, or something like that.

I agree with you edgar on all points including the point about snoods thread. We do need to do something about those awful rap songs (just the ones filled violence and demeaning words towards all people not just black women). And if this episode with Imus gets a dialogue about that started then in my judgement, it's a good thing and about time. I think the (whats the program called?) program that monitors content in on the air waves have been looking at the wrong kind of things. I mean who cares if someone's boob pops out when people are screaming out things about violence and demeaning words about women?

I've got my fingers crossed that the Imus affair will open dialogue and someone, don't know who, will finally stand up to the entertainment industry and say "enough already."

It all boils down to money. Like everything else. If the sponsors hadn't pulled away from Imus, he'd be on the air this morning. We all know this to be truth. So, admitting that it's not a case of ethics or conscience but commerce, plain and simple, is the first step.

How do you take that knowledge and use it against the twisted and perverted in the industry? I think last week presented us with an interesting blueprint. Scream loud enough and long enough for the big-money sponsors to back away from the guilty party and then watch them crumble.

Now, who's gonna start the ball rolling? It needs to happen quickly before the heat dies down.

This is all very interesting, but we all know that anytime "old stick in the mud" conservatives from many long years past suggested limiting bad books, bad content on tv, radio, and movies, the media, they were viciously attacked as book burners and for evil censorship. I think they gave up on it, and the result is where we are at now.

That's why it can't be another "stick in the mud" conservative. It needs to be someone who's viewed as hip, current and not so conservative.

The only problem with that, eoe, is that alot of people considered "hip" are off color themselves. Pop culture is sick, so you have the pot calling the kettle black, and so I don't see it going anywhere.

As I've already pointed out, this is about alot more than Imus and racism. Check out Media Matters website and read the headline and look at the pictures. Imus is nothing more than their sacrificial lamb to attempt to build the real case they are interested in. It is conservative Talk Radio and any Media they do not like, politically.

Its about what George Soros and the Democratic operation called Media Matters is really up to, which was not Imus.

http://mediamatters.org/

By the way, does this organization obtain tax exempt status, and if so, how and why?

This whole thing about it being the beginning of some liberal witch hunt against conservative talk radio sounds like a bunch of horseshit that ultra-partisan hacks invented to give themselves something to argue about.

Did you look at the website? If not, do it, and then tell us all what the page is about when it pops up. Pull your head out of the sand.

Let me ask you a question. Is Media Matters a non-partisan website?

If he had just said "nappy headed" it would have been bad, but the added "ho's" made it an insult towards women, black women in particular. It was just such a shocking thing for a person to say in that kind of setting. Of course it was going to cause a stir. If it was late night comedy on HBO, it wouldn't have raised an eyebrow, unless a white person said it. (that is just reality, not some kind of racial statement or trying to stir up some kind of white unfairness kind of a thing) Or again in a rap song.

But thats the thing, we need to get in to be unpopular for the hip crowd who buys the rap music and listens to the comedy hours on HBO and the like. We also need to get an awareness about the violence in those rap songs and even video games. Not laws which I view as censorship, but just talk it to death on shows like the View, Oprah, Maury, Ellen, Tyra Banks...

Obviously not. It can be likened to liberal news organizations that claim to be unbiased, but of course they are not. Lefties always claim to be in the center, balanced, and mainstream, but of course they are not. Token efforts are thrown in to appear to be balanced for good measure, but always come up short. Dan Rather claimed to be balanced, but of course we know what happened there.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=%5CSpecialReports%5Carchive%5C200503%5CSPE20050303a.html

Let me back up here. I assumed everyone knows Media Matters is a biggee behind starting this whole flap concerning Imus. If not, that is an important fact to know, as we can then examine the motivations and ultimate goal of this group. In other words, why Imus and why now, as this sort of stuff has been going on forever.

http://www.freepress.net/news/22398

maybe people have just had enough. someone was going to take the fall eventually.

Then I stand by my original statement.

It's all horseshit whipped up by partisan idiots who are so single-minded in their blindness, that they will turn anything into a left vs. right battle. I don't care what mediamatters did at the beginning of this.