April 16, 2007
Don Imus got what was coming to him
If you have poked around on this site at all, you will quickly realize that I dislike political correctness for its own sake. For example, I believe that Western media outlets have been far too reticent in pointing out the human rights abuses that are rampant in the Muslim Middle East--- because they are afraid of charges of Islamophobia.
As a college student during the late 1980s and early 1990s, I arrived early on the battlefront of the PC wars. I endured all the controversies about school mascots with Native American themes, and protracted debates about whether or not the term “freshman” was sexist. Most of these issues struck me as much ado about very little.
But there is a difference between political correctness and basic decency. Don Imus did not make an innocent slip of the tongue; nor did he veer into potentially politically incorrect territory for the sake of making an important argument. He was simply going out of his way to be insulting.
The Don Imus flap has been (predictably) overblown in the media; but the over-reporting of the incident doesn’t nullify a basic fact: Don Imus made an irresponsible, offensive remark, and he should have known better. (Or, as someone once said, freedom of speech does mean shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.) There has been some debate about whether his comments were more sexist than racist or vice versa. I will leave these distinctions to others, and merely say this: a grown man shouldn’t talk that way about female student athletes, whatever their race or ethnicity.
Don Imus’s right to free speech has not been violated. As a private citizen, he is free to call anyone a “nappy-headed” anything. He can put up a privately funded website and fill its pages with offensive one-liners to his heart’s content. However, CBS, MSNBC, and various advertisers have decided that allying themselves with Imus’s brand of commentary is a bad business strategy. I would be inclined to agree with them.
It should be noted that Imus is an “equal opportunity offender”. He has hurled insults and epithets at African-Americans, women, Jews, Roman Catholics, and even Italians. I don’t believe that he made the recent comments about the Rutgers student athletes because he has a specifically anti-African-American agenda. Rather, Imus has fallen into the habit that afflicts many commentators these days, on the Right and the Left: Rather than seriously analyzing the issues, they simply try to shock their audiences with the most over-the-top language they can think of. (Of late, Anne Coulter is most notable practitioner of this art form.)
This is ultimately lazy journalism, which is perhaps the best argument that anyone can cite for giving Imus’s spot to a more deserving commentator.