Was it really nine years ago? What have I been doing with my life? Bob Herbert dug up an old 60 Minutes transcript (Times Select), and it ended Don Imus’s television career.
In a “60 Minutes” interview with Don Imus broadcast in July 1998, Mike Wallace said of the “Imus in the Morning” program, “It’s dirty and sometimes racist.”
Mr. Imus then said: “Give me an example. Give me one example of one racist incident.” To which Mr. Wallace replied, “You told Tom Anderson, the producer, in your car, coming home, that Bernard McGuirk is there to do nigger jokes.”
Mr. Imus said, “Well, I’ve nev — I never use that word.”
Mr. Wallace then turned to Mr. Anderson, his producer. “Tom,” he said.
“I’m right here,” said Mr. Anderson.
Mr. Imus then said to Mr. Anderson, “Did I use that word?”
Mr. Anderson said, “I recall you using that word.”
“Oh, O.K.,” said Mr. Imus. “Well, then I used that word. But I mean — of course, that was an off-the-record conversation. But ——”
“The hell it was,” said Mr. Wallace.
This isn’t a controversy over free speech. Don Imus can say what he wants. He can make racist remarks if he wants to. He can hire a guy specifically to do nigger jokes. What he can’t do is pretend he’s not a racist if he does those things. You often hear people say that they don’t know what is in someone’s heart. That’s true. But you can come close to knowing if they hire a guy to do nigger jokes.
The issue isn’t really Imus’s cold heart. Imus is a philanthropist in his own way. You’ll hear many people talk about the good work he has done helping children with cancer. This is about something larger. It’s about an incestuous school of insiders…journalists, consultants, and politicians…that think nigger jokes are cute…that feel no need to disassociate themselves from them.
You can see them…Oliphant and Carville and Barnicle and Gregory…wringing their hands about the fate of Don Imus. They know they have to distance themselves from Imus over the Rutgers thing…but they don’t want to be cut-off forever from the I-Man. It’s a club. A club for cool kids. A club where it doesn’t matter if you’re married to Mary Matalin or you’re married to James Carville…it’s all part of the same thing.
“So…Imus did a bad thing…he hired a guy to do nigger jokes and then the guy did nigger jokes for the next, like, fifteen years. It was a disgrace. But…he’s not a bad guy. And, besides, everyone is doing it. Look at Rap Music. Look at South Park. What’s one little mistake compared to that stuff? Huh? Maybe CBS won’t totally shit-can him. I mean, doesn’t anyone believe in redemption anymore?”
David Gregory is filling in for Imus in the Morning on MSNBC this morning. He is practically pleading with every Afro-American he can haul into the studio that they have mercy on his great pal Don Imus. He told Jesse Jackson that he was forgiven for calling New York ‘Hymietown’ twenty years ago. I must have missed the forgiveness. He told Sharpton that he had been forgiven for the Tawana Brawley incident (also 20 years ago). Funny thing…I haven’t forgiven Sharpton for that…never will…and don’t except too many other people that lived in or around New York City at that time will either. Sharpton makes me laugh because he is a really funny guy. But I’ll never forgive what he did to race relations in the 1980’s.
I’ll never forgive Robert Byrd for being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, for filibustering civil rights legislation, and, more recently, talking about ‘white niggers’. I don’t care what he says about the war. He can never atone for his sins…not in this life. But I never got in bed with race-baiters like Sharpton and Byrd…so I never felt disappointed by them. I’m glad they are both behaving like decent human beings lately. That’s great. Good for them.
What David Gregory and the rest of the cocktail frankfurter set don’t understand is that there is a whole big wide America out here that isn’t white, isn’t straight, isn’t male, isn’t Groton-Harvard educated, and isn’t a fucking tool of the people they ostensibly cover.
Hey, I’m a white guy that grew up in Princeton. You think I don’t know your type? Hell…I am your type. I know all about nigger jokes from people like you.
This Imus controversy is about Beltway self-satisfied, elitist, wankers telling nigger jokes to each other on the public airwaves like they are the locker room at the Augusta National Golf Club. Oh yeah…not just nigger jokes, but jokes about women being whores, and gay men being faggots.
They fricking did this for years. Politicians would come on and talk some shit about nothing, in a typical smarmy Finemanesque way, then Bernie would call someone ‘the cleaning lady’, the sports guy would call Patrick Ewing an ape, someone else would make a joke about money-grubbing Jews, another would talk about cornrows, bitches, and gold teeth. Throw is some watermelon and fried chicken jokes…
And no one is supposed to care.
And that’s the story because none of these guests did care. They didn’t care when Clarance Page stopped appearing on the show. They didn’t care that Imus had no black guests other than (political commentator for Fox News, guest professor at Vanderbilt University, chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and vice chairman for Merrill Lynch) Harold Ford Jr..
There are no progressive voices in their little club. There’s no one around to say, “Hey, calling student-athletes ‘nappy-headed hos’ is not acceptable.” There’s no one around to say, “Invading and occupying a foreign country on trumped up intelligence is a bad idea and immoral.” Why? Because Groton-Harvard educated people have been doing this shit for years. They feel entitled to put other people’s children into a meat grinder to defend their god-given right to do whatever the fuck they want to do. And while they’re fighting and dying, they’ll call them niggers and deny them basic health care.
It’s disgusting to watch these white men on my teevee wringing their hands about how the I-Man is getting screwed. They know they’re complicit. They don’t want to face up to their own indifference, they’re own greed, and their own privilege. First it was poor, poor Scooter Libby. Now it’s poor, poor Don Imus. Same shit…different scandal.
Looks like he is going down, and I am not particularly upset about it. Let us use the momentum to shine the light on the truly racist, garbage-spewing shrills in the MSM – Coulter, Beck, Limbaugh and O’Reilly.
I can never forgive a nation for thinking that people like Imus…and Beck, and Savage, and O’Reilly…are worth listening to.
We need to take this in a much broader context. When Imus has a guy in the corner of the studio making those inappropriate comments, and he says: “Tsk, tsk,” it’s just like the average boys’ night out at the redneck bar. The fact that Americans take guilty pleasure in barely-hidden racism is a big problem.
Republicans use this barely-buried bigotry to push buttons and win elections. Tuesday night Glenn Beck told his audience:
He’s playing on fear. He’s trying to make the average white guy suspicious of the darker-skinned neighbor with the lawn blower. He’s trying to send this nation back to the 17th Century.
So don’t blame Imus, blame the people who listen to him. If we don’t move from his advertisers to Beck’s (Shell Oil and others), to Savage, and O’Reilly, and all the rest, then we are the ones who must be guilty.
Really, this kind of junior high school humor shouldn’t be well received, but it is…to our shame. You can be funny without demeaning anyone else, but you’d never know it by listening to morning radio.
As for Beck, O’Reilly, Savage – they appeal to people who feel powerless against the inevitable changes that occur as a population diversifies. They use fear to make people unite against a common “enemy”. It’s sick.
Amen! It’s a game of numbers. So-called “minorities” are soon becoming majorities, and you can’t get your way just because there are more of you any more (even though you try desperately to keep women reproducing.) You didn’t think you had to be smart, educated, or hard working–and now it seems to matter.
So that guy working so hard on your front lawn, or getting better grades in college, becomes a threat.
In most primates, grins are signs of hidden aggression or resentment.
Excellent post, BooMan.
Wow! And Amen!
I only hope that this incident can lead to some constructive conversations about the way we discuss our differences in this country.
Enough is enough.
And while we’re at it, I’d like to see “our side” stop talking about how fat Hastert and Limbaugh are, how old Byrd and McCain are and the size of Anne Coulter’s adams apple. God know there are plenty of issues out there without relying on immature stereotypes.
Great post.
You know, we see all the time how rude and nasty people have become, how nothing seems to be considered off-limits or too vicious to say, and then wonder why the world has become like that.
It’s because we’ve been tolerating outrageous hate speech on our airways for decades now…Imus, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, and others…and these people have been very successful at spreading their slime. Even on the internet…this morning I read a FP post at the big orange suggesting that Kathy Sierra was just whining about the viciousness of what was done to her. Say what? Just when is enough considered enough with regard to racisim and sexism?
I’m glad Imus is done. There are more who need to follow him out the door. And tangentially related, I’m glad that the Democratic presidential candidates are standing up and saying no Fox on the debates. Fox is nothing but hate TV.
Right on the mark, Booman! My friends and I have been bitching all week– why is hour after hour of cable TVdevoted to that creep Don Imus?? He’s an asshole. A sexist, racist, homophobic asshole who has a creepy program that anyone with half a brain will take pains to avoid. What he said is no departure from his assholitude. How is this NEWS???? I’m glad the Cosmic Boomerang of Fate has finally gotten around to him. But couldn’t understand how the hours and hours of handwringing on the alleged news shows seemed to have no end.
You have provided a clear explanation with your trenchant analysis.
Good job, Boo!
What I think is most important about this whole episode is that the door has finally been opened to the dirty little secret that so many millions in this country have, and that is the closet bigotry that is so pervasive.
And that is the really big story here. Don Imus is just the vehicle that is being used to bring all this to light. And watching all the mainstream white guys freak out about the fact that their little secret is out of the bag is very satisfying to me. If there is one issue which I think goes to the root of this country’s cognitive dissonance on race issues, it is this one. I have spent my entire life watching this bigotry in action and I never really had much hope that it would ever be acknowledged in the mainstream in such a visible fashion.
This is a wonderful thing to watch. If there was ever a singular issue which gets me angry, it is the issue of bigotry. Whether it’s in the context of sexist remarks or has to do with race or sexual orientation, I think it is the most major of cancers infecting our nation’s soul. Yeah, I’m a white guy in the heart of midwest. But damn, do I get pissed off at what I have seen promulgated over my short 47 years on this earth. Please people, let’s do everything we can to make this the start of a nationwide catharsis on the issue of bigotry. It is a tremendous opportunity for us to make a substantive leap forward on this issue. Let’s keep pushing on this. This can result in what could essentially be a national intervention of sorts on the issue of race and gender.
He’s been doing this for years and finally gets canned for it. It’s over. But it never will be. There’s a whole list of people who should go too, but this will probably be at the forefront for awhile and impede progress elsewhere – or will it provide a smokescreen up front?
On a tangentially related note, I went to school with Imus’s chiropractor’s son [I went to school and grew up in Scarsdale, NY].
Well said, Boo. It’s not against the law to be a jerk, but too many people are making a living off of it. Suddenly the corporate bottom line looks threatened, and the well is going dry.
Time has come to call a hypocrite a hypocrite.
Yup, what Booman said.
The resurgence of racist tropes in political discourse under the Bush Presidency is a concerted effort by a group of media consultants to ignite nationalistic sentiments as a palliative to late capitalist alienation. This racism is the American version of the various new social movements that emerged in the former Soviet Union and in central Asia. Instead of creating social policies to remedy the economic and infrastructural shifts accompanying transformations in our economy, these consultants, in order to quell debate and obfuscate corporate corruption and amalgamation, refocus middle class anxieties on nonexistant scapegoats. Yes, it is a perennial strategy, but it is particularly acute in this time of heightened economic and social stratification and of social despair. And oddly, in the United States this has manifested itself in both political parties: the Republican Party’s imperialistic misadventures; and he Democratic Party’s false populism and economic isolationism.
I will use the phrase here is what it means to me.
First, the Illuminati NEEDED to occupy the news bandwidth with something other than Rosie ODonnel and her comments about 911 truth and the ensuing backlash from Bill ORielly. It escapes me why the Illuminati censors missed that whole episode.
Second as the right wing paradigms loose credibility and support from greater numbers of sheep they have to ramp up the destructive left wing paragidms. The primary ones here are race,sex and political correctness.
Third, the Iserbytian populace must accept the propaganda as they watch it repeated over, and over, and over again 24/7 for four solid days.
Meanwhile the bees are dying and nobody knows why.
It’s American MSM, and to me it’s all offensive, all the time.
Tell us how you really feel. Great post.
I’m hoping the shit is finally hitting the fan and that the walls are finally starting to tumbling down.
25 years from now I’d like to see Essence Carson as CEO of CBS or NBC Universal or some other big media house.
I want to see Coach Stringer run for congress when she retires from coaching.
I’m hoping against hope that these white boys from Princeton (and Groton and Harvard and Yale and on and on) have finally reached too far and gotten too greedy and self satisfied and that people are finally saying enough is enough
Look at the Latino and Hispanic protests about immigration in the Southwest last year. Now this.
And this hoped for tidal wave may even overwhelm the democratic party if they don’t reach down into their guts and speak from the heart about values and morals and the inherent worth and dignity of all people.
that ‘white boys from Princeton’ thing still makes me flinch. But, unfortunately, it’s true.
A little outdated, but:
Which makes me want to say that I don’t know why you singled out Harvard in particular in your excellent diary. Harvard may have reactionaries among its faculty, like Samuel Huntington or Harvey Mansfield, but Princeton and Yale undergrads tend to be more right wing than Harvard undergrads, in my opinion. Harvard doesn’t have a Skull and Bones, and it is not a fluke that Bush went to Yale.
Harvard/Yale/Princeton, there’s not a whole lot of difference. Yale seems to be more clubby than the others, but they all breed the same mentality.
I disagree. There are major differences between Harvard, Yale and Princeton. And Dartmouth is more conservative than all three combined. Yale is not as conservative as Princeton, but Harvard is a lot more liberal than Yale.
that’s basically true, but (and now I will let my elitism show) Dartmouth hasn’t produced anyone of influence in their entire history. Yale is probably the worst offender in terms of giving us bad leadership. Elis also stick together more and make sure that they dominate. Harvard is definitely more liberal, but that doesn’t help when their product is the Bundys and Kissinger, etc.
Princeton gave us Schultz and Rumsfeld, but also Bill Bradley and Paul Sarbanes.
I’d actually sign up for a law that made it illegal to appoint a Yale or Princeton man to the State or Defense department.
I am thinking about the current student bodies and the composition of each university’s humanities departments. and we should not forget the cabal of neoconservatives secreted by leo strauss’s committee of social thought at the university of chicago.
Even so Harvard breeds and selects an entirely different set of students than say elite public universities like Cal and the University of Wisconsin to say nothing about strong next tier schools like Rutgers.
The northeast corridor from D.C. – Boston is very provincial and parochial in its own way.
Cal student here.
from your posts about reification. 🙂
I would guess that the main difference between the Ivies and top-tier state universities is that the students at Ivies and schools like Northwestern or Duke come from wealthier families.
Every place is provincial and parochial in some way.
Yup, it’s clubby and insider politics even when it makes you flinch or you’re part of it.
I’ve had conversations with folks about Irish-Catholic bigotry and intolerance and it still makes me flinch everytime I say it or hear those words spoken.
There is a big basketball rivalry between Princeton and Penn. The Penn students always say that they have better looking women. The Princeton students respond to this by chanting ‘You’ll work for us’.
Both insults carry a lot of truth.
Regardless, it’s very provincial. It’s also very well connected. I didn’t realize it at the time but some of my friends parents were not only teaching at Princeton, but working for the CIA as well. Nothing crazy…as analysts, I assume. I don’t think they use professors as covert officers (agents, sometimes).
Collectively, they represent a ruling class. And they’re well qualified. Princeton is actually a very progressive place…on the surface. The problem is that these people keep fucking up. The Liberals did it in the 60’s and the conservatives did it in the 00’s.
Which is why Howard Dean was such a threat with his people powered politics and take back you’re country memes.
I always found it interesting that Dean’s family was the Dean in Dean Witter.
Makes me think he knows something the rest of us don’t. 🙂
It’s disgusting to watch these white men on my teevee So don’t. Never have, never will. Screw ’em.
Seriously, hasn’t social science research shown that watching TV “news” makes people stupider?
Like they said — Wow. Great post. Writing like this is why I tell people to read your blog, BooMan. Really, it’s a relief, and makes me glad, to know there’s someone who gets it and can tell it.
cbs fires imus…
Money doesn’t talk, it swears...l think bob dylan said that.
About time! When you step over-the-line you should pay the price. The I’m a nice guy who say Racist crap, no longer works.