Market Forces

It's been years since I appeared on "Imus in the Morning," and it was only once. He made fun of me before I went on, about how I begged to be on his show, and continuing the mocking banter after the interview ended. I protested that I never asked to be invited on, much less begged, but he apparently counted inquiries made by the public-relations department at NEWSWEEK as my personally craving airtime with him.

I shrugged it off as nothing personal and wasn't surprised that I was not asked back. I'd never been a fan of his show anyway and didn't consider it a great loss. But when MSNBC started airing a TV simulcast of his radio show, I started tuning in. His acerbic manner was a welcome contrast to the soft news and banal talk that dominated the morning shows. And he was an oddly compelling figure, ravaged by long ago battles with drugs and drink; he was like watching a train wreck in progress.

Checking out Imus in the morning has been my guilty pleasure, but I think the networks made the right decision to cancel his show. There were countless times over the last several years where I've gasped at the nasty comments directed at women, gays and blacks and reached for the remote to switch to C-SPAN, where bland is beautiful. Imus is like a schoolyard bully who's been getting away with teasing people and making fun of people for so long he doesn't know when he's crossed the line. His sidekicks are even worse. What's funny about imitating the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, who has suffered from mental illness? Or making fun of fat nurses--the target du jour for a while.

Even so, I'm amazed NBC and then CBS pulled the plug. I thought Imus would survive because of money. He's been a cash cow for low-rated MSNBC, bringing in advertising dollars for three hours of broadcast time and costing the network relatively little to produce. (Disclosure: NEWSWEEK's Web site is published as part of a technology partnership with MSNBC.com) Instead, he got canned because of money. Advertisers bailed out, forcing NBC's hand. Though the head of the NBC news division cast it as a moral decision and looked anguished as he made the rounds of the cable shows Wednesday night, if the advertisers had stuck by Imus, the outcome would have been different.

The swiftness of the corporate reaction says something about the velocity of today's new media combined with the power of race. Imus's comment about the women basketball players offered a peek into how at least some of white America thinks, and it's not pretty. But white men of a certain age are getting to be a minority, and if you're an advertiser looking at brand identity and bottom line, white men are not a growth industry. That's the American Way--the power of the marketplace. Imus committed a double whammy. He offended women and people of color, and that's a whole lot of Americans. Political campaigns are about marketing--and the two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination are a woman and an African-American. Women and blacks working at NBC voiced their disgust with Imus. The head of American Express is black, and he pulled the company's advertising. It's a new world, and Imus didn't get it. A white male friend of mine laughed when I told him my thesis that the stock of white men is in decline. "There's been a decline in all institutions, public and private," he said with a chuckle--suggesting his own marriage was no exception. "Men have had to give up ground, and any time you're giving up ground it's not comfortable."

Advertisers no doubt took note of that iconic picture of the Rutgers players, which ran on the front page of major newspapers. One plays five musical instruments, another writes poetry, there's a valedictorian, a future doctor--and even if they were none of those things, they didn't deserve to have their moment of glory sullied by a know-nothing shock jock. What Imus said, goaded on by one of his sidekicks, was wrong and hurtful. And he only made it worse when he did his round of apologies by pointing out he didn't invent the offensive language, that it came out of the black community in rap and hip-hop.