Apr.09.2007 Oh boy Imus is in trouble
It’s never a good thing when every minority group is calling for your head and you don’t even have the support of your corporate heads, such is the case for Don Imus, who called some of the girls on Rutgers’ basketball team “nappy headed hoes.”
Mr. [Al] Sharpton has said he intends to complain to the Federal Communications Commission about the matter.
“Somewhere we must draw the line in what is tolerable in mainstream media,” he said on Sunday. “We cannot keep going through offending us and then apologizing and then acting like it never happened. Somewhere we’ve got to stop this.”
Allison Gollust, a spokeswoman for MSNBC, said the cable network considers Mr. Imus’s comments “deplorable” and is reviewing the matter.
Karen Mateo, a spokeswoman for CBS Radio — Mr. Imus’s employer and the owner of his New York radio home, WFAN-AM — said the company was “disappointed” in his actions and characterized his comments as “completely inappropriate.”
First of all, I refuse to believe anyone can accuse a person who’s always wearing a cowboy hat of being racist. Secondly, how bad is it when your spokespeople don’t apologize and rather just completely hang you out to dry and not defend you in the least?
I completely agree that Sharpton shouldn’t keep taking these half-assed apologies and that keep on letting people off the hook. At the same time, it’s NOT an FCC violation (nothing profane was said, just racist….that’s why we have a First Amendment) and it’s idiotic for people to always try to get the government involved because you’re offended. Why doesn’t Sharpton speak out against the media portraying a criminal as a “6′2 male” because they can’t say “Black” out of fear of being politically incorrect? Why not chastise Tim Hardaway or Isiah Washington for anti-gay comments and implore Black people to not discriminate against others as they have been?
I know I sound like a real hippie here, but I think comedy is art and that art should never be held to social standards of offensive/inoffensive. The First Amendment is one of those things that shouldn’t be subjective, but most anti-defamation leagues aim to make everything into a matter of “If it’s offensive to me, it must be stopped.” Judge Imus not for his poor attempt at a joke, but rather for backing down from his rights. And also looking like the result of a shar pei’s intimate encounter with a catcher’s mitt.
http://www.thestar.com/article/200265