Blog of Jeff

Don Imus has decided to not ride disgracefully into the sunset. (MSN story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18439618/?GT1=9951) He is suing CBS Radio for the bulk of the $40 million dollar salary he would have been paid for the remainder of his 5 year contract.

The quote I like from the MSN story is from Imus’ attorney, Martin Garbus.

“Garbus cited a contract clause in which CBS acknowledged that Imus’ services were “unique, extraordinary, irreverent, intellectual, topical, controversial.” The clause said Imus’ programming was “desired by company and … consistent with company rules and policy,” according to Garbus.”

From the beginning of this story, the part that has bothered me the most was everyone putting all the blame and punishment on Imus. He was merely the front man for a multi-million dollar insult machine. CBS Radio paid him to be offensive, audiences listened to him because he was offensive and sponsors ran ads on his show to reach those audiences. Everyone involved, including the audience, enabled and encouraged Imus to use insults for entertainment. His severe punishment for one offensive statement doesn’t cleanse the thousands of people that had no problem with his years of previous offensive statements.

I think Imus winning this lawsuit would be a fantastic win-win. His critics will be happy that he is off the air and a bigger villain in this story, CBS Radio, will foot the bill. CBS Radio set the rules of this game and then pretended that they were innocent bystanders. Losing $40 million dollars to Imus, as well as the high ratings and advertisement dollars that his show would have made is a great way to get this punishment moved to a much bigger culprit that Imus. He gave voice to obscenity, but CBS Radio gave it a home.

This is the first entry in a few days. I didn’t want to blog about the Virginia Tech. incident and it didn’t feel right to blog about anything else, so that led to a short break.

The only thing that really makes sense right now is to offer condolences for everyone and anyone affected by the tragedy. The media blitz is in full force, but it seems premature for all the judgements that the commentators are now making. Of course, they really don’t have a choice either. It seems offensive to talk about anything else and they have to grasp at any possible point of controversy to fill their shows.

The only observation that I hope many Americans note is that violence of an even greater scale is happening in Iraq on an almost daily basis. As we come to terms with our own pain, we should also be empathetic to the suffering of innocents there. People dying senselessly and without warning is a tragedy anywhere it happens. Again, I offer condolences to all affected by the violence, here and there.

Well, it is done and Imus is gone. He was completely unsympathetic and completely guilty of doing what he was accused of doing. And, a lot of it had to do with advertisers pulling out, which is really more about the free market than censorship, so I won’t spend much time or energy on that thought.

However, it still irritates me that this firestorm was over an insult. What caused more harm and embarassment to those basketball players? Imus and his relatively small audience or all of the comedians and news media repeating the remarks over and over and over to their much larger audiences.

Harvey Fierstein has an interesting editorial in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/opinion/13fierstein.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) about not being able to figure out which people get protected status and which ones don’t. His particular example is that it seems perfectly OK to insult fat people and gay people, while female college basketball players are now apparently in the protected class.

Anyway,  radio is still the home to a lot of trash as bad or worse than Imus. We still have Rush, despite his tendency to implicate the Clintons in the murder of Vince Foster. We still have DJ’s that have contests encouraging people to have sex in churches. Stern is now on satellite, but he didn’t exactly build his empire on puritan values. In fact, his success in the early NY days was largely built on being a lower-class alternative to Imus.

I have a feeling that Don will spend a time in exile and then return either through books or satellite to an even bigger audience than he had before all of this, which is still the biggest irony to the whole event. Calls for censorship make martyrs out of people who should be ignored and gives their work far more respect than it deserves.

Well, it happened. Imus is off TV and there are still calls for him to be off the radio. Apparently, it doesn’t matter that his comments were actually quite mild compared to a lot of his own older material and lots of other shock jocks. It doesn’t even matter than Cheney has been quoted being more offensive in congress.

Let’s consider what Imus did. He insulted a group of women in a way that is also insulting to all blacks and women. The entire headline of this story is “Shock jock insults people.” And yet, somehow, it caught everyone in the United States by total surprise.

The sad thing is that he isn’t going down for his quote. Imus is going down for the complicity that all of his listeners and advertisers are feeling. They knew Imus made offensive jokes and they have known it for years. For all practical purposes, they sponsored that joke and had no problems selling their wares to an audience that liked that joke; just like they did for all the more offensive jokes he has been making for years. But they are all pretending that they are shocked, simply shocked, that this radio host would say such a thing.

The TV commercials for “Saw,” “Grindhouse” and “Hostel” are more offensive than what Imus said. Of course, that is only my opinion, which means absolutely nothing. I don’t want to live in a sterlized world where my sensitivities define my world; I want to live in the real world where sometimes people get insulted and offended. I just wish the opinions of these self-proclaimed leaders also meant absolutely nothing. They don’t care about the particular women who were insulted any more than Imus does. They just see a grand stage for a political statement.

By the way, how much attention do you think Sharpton paid to his ratings on the day Imus apologized? I’m a little offended by Sharpton giving a voice to racists like Imus, so maybe he should be fired. Of course, Sharpton is fine with Imus having a voice as long as it is under his scrutiny and control. (and brings in the ratings for his show …) Sharpton’s calls for Imus to be off radio might have rung a little more true for me if Sharpton didn’t turn around and hand him a microphone for a radio show.

I wonder how he and Jesse Jackson split up the apologizing racists. Jesse got the Michael Richards apology. Oddly enough, I don’t think Mel Gibson apologized on either of their radio shows. Maybe they aren’t as worried about other races being insulted. I’m not sure where anti-semites are supposed to go to apologize; maybe Jon Stewart should try and grab that niche. That approach to booking guests seems to keep Al and Jesse’s plates full.

I don’t listen to Imus, but my working assumptions are that he is:

1. a racist jerk
2. a man who makes a living by appealing to racist jerks
3. a combination of the above

With that in mind, I have no problem with audiences or advertisers leaving him. However, the calls for his firing or for FCC investigations strikes way too close to censorship for my tastes.

The other part of this whole thing that stinks is that there are blatantly racist, violent and degrading elements the media that rate far worse than Imus’ comments. An excellent LA Times editorial (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rice11apr11,0,5538321.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail) makes the point that there is an entire musical genre dedicated to degrading women. I have no problem with the Al Sharpton’s and Jesse Jackson’s of the world denoucing Imus, but if they are going to try and censor him, then they should also go after all those musicians making money from songs about beating women, killing cops and taking drugs.

I also have a bone to pick with the ACLU. I used to member of that organization, because that’s just the sort of group that college jounalists join. I dropped my membership several years ago and one of the reasons I dropped it was that they started to demonstrate a preference for certain people and types of free speech over others. They are perfectly willing to go to the Supreme Court for crazy, violent and minority individuals’ rights to free speech, but as of this posting, haven’t written a single word about Don on the free speech section of their website. Not even a single token “censorship is bad.” Apparently, national calls for censorship of a rich white jerk don’t concern them as much as national calls to censor muslim clerics preaching death to America.

Well, censorship is censorship. And, if it is true that the bad guys automatically win when we change who we are by giving up civil liberties, it is just as true for Don Imus. Let the free market determine if he stays or goes, not the sensitivities of the offended.

Troy Patterson reviewed the new TV show The Tudors for Slate today (http://www.slate.com/id/2162994/). I haven’t seen the show (which is about Henry VIII in his youth) and Patterson didn’t give it much praise, but one scene he described from the show really struck my fancy.

“I’ve received a gift from the Duke of Urbino,” Henry broods to Sir Thomas More. “It’s a book called The Prince by a Florentine, Niccolò Machiavelli. … It’s not like your book Utopia. It’s less … utopian.”

I love humor by understatement, so that probably explains my enjoyment of this quote. It also gives me an opportunity to report with great sadness that one of my all-time favorite understatements appears to have been, in fact, mistranslated. I used to love reading the line in Beowulf that Grendel’s mother was a “monster of a woman.” Apparently, scholars now believe that the proper translation probably would have something closer to “warrior lady” and not implied any monstrosity at all. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grendel’s_mother for the full discussion.)

So, the one line that made the entire long, drawn out epic worth reading to me has been taken away. Thanks, Wikipedia. And thank you too, Beowulfian scholars. I have learned something and I am a lesser man for it.

Oh well, at least I still have Katherine Hepburn’s marvelous understatement in The Lion in Winter’s classic quote, “What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?” If you have never seen that movie, you need to find it. That line is one of the most perfect ever delivered on screen.

I was a little hard on Wolf the other day. Most media outlets covered the same silly story in that same silly way, so it would be more accurate to blast the entire TV news genre. The sad thing about Wolf is that I really liked him years ago. I liked the stories he covered and the way he covered them. Plus, he had that ultra-cool name. Then other news channels brought competition to CNN and everything went downhill.

In TV, competition means ratings and ratings mean entertainment. The news channels look for the stories that everyone wants to see and present those stories through the lenses they think will get the most people to watch it. This is why I think it is funny when I hear people complaining about media consolidation and how that will give people a one-sided view of the world.

There is competition now and the quality sucks. Whether we have 3 companies seeking maximum viewership through lowest common denominator reporting or 30, it is all still about sensationalism. When CNN was the only 24-hour cable news outlet, I think the quality was better. They focused on being a quality news outlet. Now they focus on being more watched than Fox News or MSNBC or Entertainment Tonight.

It’s funny to hear Jon Stewart respond to critics who mention that more people get their news from him than other sources. He always talks about the fact that his show isn’t trying to be a news show and shouldn’t be compared to news shows. But the sad truth is that the the “news” shows are really entertainment shows and should be compared to his. They shouldn’t be compared because he is a quality source of news; they should be compared because they are a lame source of entertainment. If you want to keep up on current events without meaningful analysis, you might as well watch someone funny. (And Stewart frequently get a little meaningful analysis into the mix as a bonus anyway.)

I just saw Wolf Blitzer’s show on CNN (my first and last time of this year) and he was making a big deal about Senator Hagel’s interview with Esquire magazine. Basically, Hagel said IF the President continued to ignore Congress and public opinion, SOME people MIGHT start calling for impeachment. Those three words basically strip all meaning out of the sentence, which doesn’t even necessarily imply that Hagel would even go along with such a radical idea, but hey, it sounds dumb enough to be news. 

Well, SOME people have been calling for that for a while. Those people have been left-wing idiots who have apparently forgotten how stupid, expensive and internationally embarrasing it was when congress did it to their guy. Hagel speculating about the potential growth of that particular group of people to include some idiots from other parts of the political spectrum doesn’t change the fact that it is a STUPID idea. Bush only has 2 years left and we don’t need an international spectacle between now and then.

But that’s enough talking about the idea that is so stupid that it isn’t worth talking about in the first place. My main issue is with Wolf Blitzer somehow making this a news story. (And why does TV need magazines for source material anyway? Can’t they interview Hagel anytime they want for themselves? It ain’t like he’s hiding from any cameras these days. His need for camera time is why he chose to say something with silly shock value anyway. I’d take this story seriously if it was about how people say stupid things to get on TV, which would portray Hagel exactly they way he should be portrayed here.)

So then Wolf brings his crack team of political insiders into the conversation to give us the brilliant observation that being an unpopular President is not grounds for impeachment and that it is an extremely unlikely event. Of course, they did show Kucinich’s YouTube video explaining how Bush’s deceptions led us into war, so we can’t rule it out COMPLETELY. I mean, Kucinich on YouTube has got to rate pretty high as a reference for most constitutional scholars.

Here’s my suggestion for television news shows. Don’t make stories about completely unrealistic scenarios based on a Senator’s interview in Esquire magazine just because it contains an unusually stupid idea.

Oh goody, Wolf is jumping back to the excitement of Anna Nicole. I can’t wait for his show to track down whatever magazine interview has new information about that case. I hear GQ has some solid leads.