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By Newsweek Editors
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Don Imus is neither the first--nor is he likely to be the last--radio talk show host to find himself in scalding waters. Imus has been cracking wise behind a microphone for nearly 40 years, since 1968, and has been dubbed by Talkers, a radio trade magazine, one of the greatest radio talk show hosts of all time. Hardly a stranger to controversy, he's been accused of homophobia, racism and misogyny in the past. But it was one sentence, an unfunny three-second throwaway line in a conversation about the Rutgers women's basketball team, that threw the future of his decades-long career into question. "That's some nappy-headed hos, there," he said on April 4, painfully aping the language of the streets, offending some listeners and insulting the highly accomplished members of the team.
Fallout was swift. After community leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Jr., and even genial Al Roker called for his dismissal, Imus apologized and promised to change the character of his show. MSNBC and CBS announced they would suspend him from his television and radio programs for two weeks. Major advertisers--Proctor and Gamble and Staples--began pulling ads from his show.
Where this will all lead for Imus, 66, remains to be seen, but perhaps sifting through the tea leaves of past talk show host scandals can provide some clues: "shock jocks" Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge Clem's stations were each slapped with some of the largest fines in the Federal Communications Commission's history for content "designed to pander to, titillate and shock listeners." Both have taken their shows--and their audiences--to satellite radio where no one polices their risqué material. John Nichols, a political blogger and co-author of three books on the media with Robert W. McChesney, is been deeply critical of such intervention by FCC, which was then chaired by Michael Powell. "Under Kevin Martin [since April 2006], it's a more serious FCC that tends to jump less into the high profile cases and focus on major policy matters like ownership and net neutrality. I disagree with Martin a lot, but in fairness to him that's a reality--Powell was more inclined to showbiz initiatives."
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Nichols suggests that with less media consolidation, and a more diverse ownership of outlets, there would be more of a competitive free market in which the foibles of a single individual become less significant. "We worry about an Imus or a [Rush] Limbaugh because they have platforms from which to speak that are so dominant." Indeed, once you get past the Sterns and Love Sponge's of the radio world, less well-known hosts haven't fared as well in disgrace. Dave Lenihan was quickly fired last year for using a racial epithet in describing Secretary of State Condoleezza during his St. Louis morning show; in 1995 Bob Grant expressed his hope, when a plane carrying then-commerce secretary Ron Brown was reported to have crashed, that Brown did not survive. Of the two, only Grant, a talk show pioneer, found work again in terrestrial radio, albeit at a smaller station in New York.
For his part, Imus had cultivated a reputation over the course of his career for saying outlandish, even shocking, things, causing some industry watchers to suggest that this unfolding story is less about one man's alleged racism than it is about a reluctance to frankly discuss racial politics in this country. "Don Imus remains a focal point of an issue that has very little to do with radio personalities," says Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers. "This really should be a story about negative ethnic stereotypes in popular culture. You think the girls on that team don't have rap records in their collection? If Imus is fired, so should every executive who put him on the air at CBS for the past 10 years, because they know what they had." Perhaps. But if he is fired, it's a safe bet that his voice will find a home on an airwave near you.
Want more examples from talk radio's not-so-distant scandalous past? Keep clicking through our rogue's gallery of talk show hosts that have gotten into trouble for running their mouths without putting their brains in gear.
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