The Power That Was

But there was always the other side of Imus, too. It's hard for anyone to argue that Imus's racially charged tirades were a secret. He was on the radio every weekday. And not everyone looked away. As Imus gained in power and popularity, he was the subject of the occasional unflattering media story. In 1998, Imus told a "60 Minutes" producer that McGuirk, his foulmouthed friend and the show's producer, was "there to do n----r jokes." Imus at first tried to deny saying it, then admitted to it but claimed it was supposed to be off the record. The late columnist Lars-Erik Nelson wrote a stinging piece criticizing Sen. Joe Lieberman, another Imus favorite, for appearing on the show at the same time he was campaigning against smut in Hollywood.

At least one former Imus regular tried to get the host to renounce his racial humor. In 2000, Clarence Page, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, went on the show and asked Imus to take a pledge to knock off the racial jokes. Imus went along. But he ignored the pledge and never invited Page, who is black, back on the show.

There was no way for Imus to ignore the fallout from his Rutgers slur. It was beyond his control almost from the moment he uttered it, thanks to the new viral media culture. Armed only with a microphone, a relic from another age, Imus couldn't possibly keep up with the torrent of anger the remark unleashed.

Young black journalists were among the first to demand that Imus be ousted. Thursday evening, one day after Imus's comments, Jemele Hill, an ESPN reporter, posted the Media Matters link on the National Association of Black Journalists' e-mail list. Greg Lee, a Boston Globe reporter, spotted it right away. "I couldn't believe Imus would pick on people he had no right to pick on," he says. Lee forwarded the story to other online forums. In a matter of hours, black journalists in newsrooms across the country were clicking on it, and getting angry. The next day the NABJ demanded an apology from Imus, then called for him to be fired.

Members of the National Organization for Women sent out urgent "Action Alerts" encouraging them to flood CBS and NBC headquarters, and local stations, with thousands of calls and e-mails to "Dump Don."

As the campaign from below was spreading at the speed of e-mail, the suits in the corporate suites at NBC and CBS were still working in 20th-century time. The networks took the usual first steps: they suspended Imus, waiting to see how bad the damage would be, and whether advertisers would start to bail. But inside NBC, rank-and-file employees and reporters were growing impatient with what they considered foot-dragging. NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker heard from a subordinate about the growing uproar at NBC News, especially among black journalists, and knew immediately it was "obviously a huge problem and completely unacceptable," according to two people familiar with his thinking who did not want to be named discussing their boss. But the higher-ups still didn't understand just how big a problem they had, until complaints started rolling in from employees all over the company, including USA Network and Telemundo, the film group in Hollywood, and NBC-owned-and-operated local stations around the country.