With the Virginia Tech shootings, the flap over radio shock jock
Don Imus’ grossly inappropriate on-air remarks about the Rutgers’
women’s basketball team blew through and over fairly quickly.
With the Virginia Tech shootings, the flap over radio shock jock Don Imus’ grossly inappropriate on-air remarks about the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team blew through and over fairly quickly. His remarks were racist, sexist, demeaning and mean-spirited, and what seemed to make it all worse – aimed at promising young women who’ve overcome odds to achieve and make it to the pinnacle of their sport.
The calls for his firing came faster than you could say You Tube, and they came from the typical players – the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, to name only two – who seem to forget their own inappropriate remarks.
The debate turned on whether he should be fired because someone who says such vile things shouldn’t be on the air, or not fired because we are, after all, a country that values free speech.
The debate became moot when he was fired, two weeks later, by his parent company that carried and distributed his show, only after enraged sponsors pulled their advertising dollars.
The charges of hypocrisy people fired at each other reached a new level when it became clear that the firing didn’t have anything to do with right and wrong, but about dollars.
And that’s the puzzling thing for us.
At the risk of sounding like we support Imus – we clearly don’t – we do wonder if sponsors are going to pull dollars from Imus’ show, why not from other media artists who use the same terms in their music and their movies? Is marketability the only criterion for doing the right thing?
Imus and windbags like him aren’t the problem; even media companies aren’t the problem. The problem is we have let vile, demeaning, violent, sexist, racist words and imagery permeate our culture so fully, we hardly bother to stand up to it anymore.
To what point could we dial back so that we felt we could?
