Imus: Race, Power and the Media
by Weston Kosova
Newsweek April 23, 2007 issue
As he spoke, Don Imus had no inkling—none, he later told NEWSWEEK—that he had said anything that would cause him trouble. Wednesday, April 4, started and finished like any other day for the talk-show host. Enthroned in his high-backed chair in his New Jersey studio just outside New York City, Imus, cragged and cranky as ever, bullied and joked and cajoled his way through his volatile four-hour morning radio program, broadcast nationwide five days a week by CBS affiliates and simulcast on MSNBC. Always particular about his looks, Imus wore his hipster cowboy jacket with the collar flipped up, his studiously tousled hair grazing his shoulders.
Imus's show that day was supposed to be the usual mix of the high-minded and the profane. Among the guests: Sen. Chris Dodd, an Imus favorite who had announced he was running for president on the show earlier this year. In a sports segment, talk turned to the NCAA women's basketball game between Rutgers University and Tennessee. "That's some rough girls from Rutgers," Imus cracked. "Man, they've got tattoos and ... " At that point Bernie McGuirk, Imus's longtime friend and producer, jumped in. "Some hard-core hos," he said. Imus, laughing, pressed further. "That's some nappy-headed hos there, I'm going to tell you that now," he said. Belly laughs all around. After a few more ugly jibes, they were on to the next thing. Or so he thought.
Imus, who had been on the air for more than three decades and claimed he'd practically invented shock radio, had spilled countless words into the ether, many of them crude, tasteless, racially charged and intended to insult. Most of them simply evaporated. He got a thrill from his role as a provocateur, and rarely missed a chance to push the boundaries.
Imus's show, like the shock jock himself, had always been something of a one-man culture clash. At 66, the "I-Man" was still big on tasteless caricatures of anyone in the news, or in his sight. (He called Dick Cheney "Pork Chop Butt.") He seemed to revel in reducing his targets to crude racial and ethnic stereotypes. A running gag had McGuirk lampooning New York Roman Catholic cardinals John O'Connor and Edward Egan as vulgar Irishmen with thick brogues. Arabs were "ragheads." NBA star Patrick Ewing was a "knuckle-dragging moron." McGuirk did an impression of poet Maya Angelou, telling whites to "Kiss my big black a--."
But Imus took special pride in his unlikely role as host and scold to the nation's ruling political class. He goaded the journalists and politicians who begged to appear on his show, belittling them as "fat losers" and "baldheaded weasels" or worse, and asking, with mock solemnity, for their analysis of the presidential "erection." He once called Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz, a regular on the show, a "boner-nosed, beanie-wearing Jew boy." Kurtz considered it part of the game. "I wasn't thrilled, but I just shrugged it off as Imus's insult shtik," says Kurtz, who has said that Imus helped make one of his books a best seller. "I don't believe for a second that he doesn't like Jewish people." Like the coolest bully on the playground, the outlaw kid others wanted to be seen with, Imus made his guests feel honored to be insulted by him. He tempered the abuse with just enough ego-stroking flattery to keep them coming back for more. (Those who didn't care for his shtik either avoided him or quickly fell off the invite list.)
Between insults, he gave politicians and journalists, including some from NEWSWEEK, lots of air time to discuss serious issues and plug their books. He asked real questions and then listened to the answers. The show became an influential salon for the politically connected. Powerful people tuned in to hear what other powerful people would say. For a certain segment of status-obsessed journalists, being called names by Imus was better than not being called at all. Imus had a talent for coaxing his guests into saying what they really thought, often in salty language they'd never use on more "respectable" shows. "I wanted to be where the action was on my beat," says NEWSWEEK's Howard Fineman, an Imus regular. "The show, however unsavory it could be, was one of those places. I thought, or perhaps only imagined, that being on the show gave me more clout on the beat."
NEWSWEEK's Evan Thomas, another regular guest on the show, sometimes wondered if Imus went too far. "But I rationalized my appearances by pointing to other prominent journalists and politicians who did it, too," he says. "I was eager to sell books, and I liked being in the in crowd."
Imus may have come off as your deranged, half-addled uncle (he kicked booze and drugs years ago), but he also came to the microphone each morning carefully prepared for battle. He read more books and newspapers than most of his guests and was a formidable interrogator who could cut the powerful down to size.
On a recent show, Imus badgered Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, a frequent guest, about the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed hospital. Schumer tried to go for the high-and-mighty approach, castigating Republicans for failing the troops. Imus pounced. When was the last time Schumer visited the troops at Walter Reed? Deflated, Schumer haltingly admitted he hadn't been there in years.
Now and then, Imus was called out as a bigot. He denied it. His show, he said, made fun of everyone. The accusations seemed only to embolden him. It was the reason many listeners tuned in. What was he going to say next? In fact, unknown to Imus, one of his most loyal listeners in Washington, D.C., was watching, and taping, the show every day for just that reason: to make a record of everything Imus said. But 26-year-old Ryan Chiachiere wasn't a fan, and he wasn't tuning in to be entertained. Chiachiere is one of a handful of young activists who spend their days wading through hours of radio and cable shows for Media Matters for America, a liberal group whose sole purpose is rooting out and "correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Wired on coffee, Chiachiere was watching a recording of Imus's show when he noticed the "hos" remark.
It was a big hit at the group's morning meeting. The Rutgers players weren't well-fed journalists or posturing politicians, public figures who could fend for themselves. They were just a hardworking team of young women who had done nothing to draw his ire but play college basketball while being black. "They weren't involved in any barroom brawls. They weren't part of this conversation and they didn't ask for this," says Jeff Greenfield, now of CBS, a political analyst and longtime Imus guest who says he appreciated the "weird" mix of high and low. "It was a crude slur, and it was also cruel. That's what tipped this whole thing over."
The group posted a video clip of the exchange on its Web site and put it up on YouTube. It sent e-mails to journalists and civil-rights and women's groups. The word, and the outrage, spread quickly. A week later, Imus was gone, banished from his multimillion-dollar television and radio show even before he had the chance to complete the all-too-familiar cycle of public penance that high-profile sinners are usually granted.
Long protected by the senators and journalistic satraps who paid him court, Imus found himself consumed by perhaps the only forces in American life more powerful than those that elevated him to his place of privilege: the politics of race and gender. With his double-barreled Rutgers remark, he inadvertently unleashed years of pent-up anger about his racial, ethnic, misogynist and homophobic antics. Suddenly some of America's largest media companies and most important corporate advertisers were confronted with the fact that they had been complicit in the rise and reign of a purveyor of ugly stereotypes. Mainstream figures and institutions that had chosen to compartmentalize the Imus kingdom—enjoying the salon while overlooking the slurs—realized they could no longer have it both ways.
The remark and its aftermath brought renewed attention to a perennial fissure in American life: the starkly different ways in which blacks and whites can see the world. (The Imus saga now joins the O. J. Simpson verdict and Hurricane Katrina as vivid chapters in the story of race in America.) Thirty-nine years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, racism remains a central issue in our national life. The story of Imus's long career sheds light on an uncomfortable fact: media power is still concentrated largely in white hands and, as a result, racism is sometimes tolerated and enabled in ways that many white Americans are unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge.
A crucial lesson of Imus's fall, however, is that power is a fluid thing. In earlier eras he would almost certainly have withstood the storm, but 2007 is a different time. A woman and a black man are the front runners for the Democratic presidential nomination. The country is growing ever more diverse. This is not Dr. King's promised land, but it is a changing land—a truth Don Imus, and his court, just learned in the hardest way possible, as the grace and dignity of female scholar-athletes toppled one of the media powerhouses of the age.
A self-styled cowboy who dropped out of college after a week, Imus was, in looks and temperament, as far from the mold of the Washington establishment as you could get. He was a pioneer in the shock-jock genre and sat at the top of the ratings ("Are you naked?" he asked women who called in to the show). By the time acts like Howard Stern started beating him at his own game, Imus was looking to expand beyond his repertoire of racial humor and toilet jokes.
He kicked drugs and drink and, in 1988, began booking politicians and journalists on his show. At first it was slow going. Few of them wanted to get down in the gutter with the shock king. But the lure of free air time was hard to pass up, and before long people were asking to be let on the show. One of them was Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. In 1992, he used his appearance on the show to get his name out and establish himself as a regular guy. Along the way, Imus became the kind of media celebrity he once mocked. He moved into a pricey apartment on New York's Upper West Side. He ridiculed politicians or journalists who snubbed his offers to appear on the show.
If some of Imus's material made his guests queasy, they reassured themselves that Imus was just putting on an act—an equal-opportunity abuser who went after everyone. "He occasionally accused me of being drunk or being queer," says NBC chief White House correspondent David Gregory, a frequent guest on the show. "Imus was living in two worlds. There was the risqué, sexually offensive, sometimes racially offensive, satire, and then there was this political salon about politics and books. Some of us tuned in to one part and tuned out the other ... Whether I was numb to the humor that offended people or in denial, I don't know."
Imus is a complicated man. He and his wife, Deirdre, run a ranch for kids with cancer and blood diseases in New Mexico during the summer, doing much of the work themselves. ("There aren't counselors, there's not someone else who is with these kids or responsible for these kids," Deirdre told NEWSWEEK. "We're their surrogate parents when they are there for nine days at a time"—and she says 50 percent of the young people are minorities; 10 percent are African-American.) For years Imus has raised millions for charity; pressed to put autism on the national agenda; championed the construction of a veterans' rehabilitation hospital in San Antonio, Texas; campaigned to raise the death benefit for families of fallen warriors, and raised awareness about sudden infant death syndrome and sickle-cell anemia, among other good causes.
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.
NBC News president Steve Capus called for an extraordinary meeting of African-American employees on Tuesday, April 10. The gathering was in New York, but other staffers joined by conference call from Washington. Zucker had a policy that people should speak their minds, without fear of retribution. And that's what they did. According to people who attended the meeting but didn't want to be named discussing internal matters, weatherman Al Roker told Capus, "That could have been my daughter Imus was joking about." (Roker, lighthearted on television, surprised many with a scorching blog item against Imus, saying he was "tired of the diatribes, the 'humor' at others' expense, the cruelty that passes for 'funny'." Others piled on. "I'm telling you, Capus got lobbied hard, really hard, and he really took it to heart," says an NBC News senior producer. "We went out and created diversity in our newsrooms and we empowered employees to say what they think. And they're telling us. It's good for us and it's good for the country."
Imus himself was slow to understand how much trouble he was in. He apologized, admitted the remark was reprehensible, and began reaching out to the Rutgers team and to African-American leaders. But an attempt to make amends by appearing on the Rev. Al Sharpton's radio show turned sour when the two began jousting, a fight that spilled over into a heated exchange on the "Today" show. By Wednesday of last week, major advertisers were pulling out. MSNBC followed and CBS pulled the plug Thursday. (Before the show's demise, NEWSWEEK decided that its staffers would no longer appear on the program.)
For the first time in three decades, Imus is without a show. His wife, Deirdre, told NEWSWEEK that her husband will be back. "When he's in front of a microphone again, it will be about how to heal the issue of divisiveness and race. That is what's in his heart. No one else will conduct this conversation. No one else would talk about autism and Walter Reed. "
Throughout his long week, Imus asked that he be judged on his whole life's work. He talked of his support for Harold Ford Jr. in last year's Tennessee Senate race, and reminisced about broadcasting the sermons of Pentecostal Bishop G. E. Patterson. He apologized in person to the Rutgers team last week, not long after he found out he'd lost his job, and they accepted. He is optimistic—perhaps overly so, given the commercial pressures that brought him down—about the future. In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, Imus said, "I could go to work tomorrow. Bigger deal. More money. TV simulcast ... I've got a summer of kids to cowboy with and then we'll see." He knows what he said was wrong, and that there is much to do. Asked whether his recovery from addiction had given him the strength to cope with the current crisis, he sounded like, well, Imus: "I'm a good and decent person who made a mistake in the context of comedy," he wrote in the e-mail. "My strength comes from not being full of sh-- and a coward." Perhaps, but there was nothing brave about the exchange that brought him low and reminded the establishment that it must always look hard at itself rather than look the other way.
