The Imus Enablers Are
Ba-a-a-ack!
Rory O'Connor
It didn’t take long for the Don Imus enablers to re-emerge. Just months after the racist, sexist and homophobic shock jock was fired for his on-air characterization of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s” — and less than two weeks after Citadel Broadcasting announced his impending return to radio -– the Big Media and Big Politics elite are crawling out of the woodwork to embrace Imus all over again.
It’s no surprise that executives of major media corporations rushed to defend Imus by claiming, as did Citadel Broadcasting CEO Farid Suleman, “He’s more than paid the price for what he did.” After all, as recently noted in the New York Observer, “redemption and rehabilitation are secondary concerns” for Citadel. Phil Boyce, operations manager at the company’s flagship station WABC, spelled it out in stark terms, explaining, “Obviously, there are a couple of reasons to look at him, but the biggest reason is the revenue opportunity. There’s a lot of money to be made there. And we’re in the business of making money.”
-snip-
Why would Kurtz put up with such bile? Perhaps it’s because, as Auletta noted in his New Yorker article, (quoting a top Simon and Schuster executive,) Imus is “the second most powerful person in the country in terms of selling books.” The publisher specifically credited the shock jock with boosting his company’s print order for Kurtz’s book “Spin Cycle” from twenty-five thousand copies to two hundred thousand. The motivation for Kurtz’ acceptance was perhaps best explicated by the novelist, Newsweek and onetime New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, who when speaking of the market power of Imus, told Auletta, “All you need do is hear him wax poetic about your book and you say, ‘Hell, I’d buy that book.’”
As Auletta concluded, “Five mornings a week, from five-thirty to ten, Imus in the Morning takes care of his ‘guys’—promoting their books, their columns, and their lives to more than ten million listeners.” The payback? “The program generates nearly half of the fifty million dollars a year in revenue which WFAN contributes to its corporate parent, CBS Radio.”Besides book sales, there are other reasons bigwigs continue to enable Imus. Another Imus regular, ex-CNN political analyst Jeff Greenfield (now of CBS News) told Auletta,
“For a lot of people, going on Imus is a way for them to be a different person.” Greenfield told Auletta he often got more comments for his Imus appearances than for his own television work. “People who talk to Imus are selling themselves as personalities, far removed from, say, the confines of a scripted newscast,” Auletta explained. “The television anchors Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather are regulars; another is Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes, who says,
]‘You get to feel like you’re a member of his club.’” Wallace in particular should have known better than to join the club; he had exposed on 60 Minutes Imus’ use of the word “nigger” just a year before speaking with Auletta. (Wallace interviewed an ex-producer who quoted Imus as saying he had hired staff member Bernard McGuirk “to do nigger jokes.” Imus responded that the conversation with the producer had been “off-the-record.”)
more at.....................
http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/2007/11/16/theyre-ba-a-a-ack/
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