An Experiment in Scotch

CBS has fired Don Imus over his com­ments on the Rut­gers women’s bas­ket­ball team. While I’m amazed this has turned into the brouhaha that it has, I can under­stand fir­ing him in this media crazed world we live in. But this com­ment by Leslie Moonves, pres­i­dent of CBS is pretty rich:

“There has been much dis­cus­sion of the effect lan­guage like this has on our young peo­ple, par­tic­u­larly young women of color try­ing to make their way in this soci­ety,” CBS Pres­i­dent and Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer Leslie Moonves said in announc­ing the deci­sion. “That con­sid­er­a­tion has weighed most heav­ily on our minds as we made our decision.”

Really Leslie? You were wor­ried about the effect this had on our young women of color? Even though you have at least 3 or 4 urban sta­tions on CBS Radio that I’m sure play artists who have said things 10 times worse about young women of color?

What really weighed heav­ily on your mind is fact that adver­tis­ers were pulling ad money left and right over this ker­fluffle (my new favorite word). That’s all this was, a busi­ness deci­sion. If it hadn’t blown up in the blo­gos­phere, I can garrone-tee (thank you Justin Wil­son) Imus would still have a job.

Some fun quotes from Rev. Jack­son and Mr. Sharpton:

Jack­son called the fir­ing “a vic­tory for pub­lic decency. No one should use the pub­lic air­waves to trans­mit racial or sex­ual degradation.”

Yup, I bet that never hap­pens on Urban radio.

Said Sharp­ton: “He says he wants to be for­given. I hope he con­tin­ues in that process. But we can­not afford a prece­dent estab­lished that the air­ways can com­mer­cial­ize and main­stream sex­ism and racism.”

Right, noth­ing in the air­ways com­mer­cial­izes and main­streams sex­ism and racism, noth­ing to see here folks, move along, noth­ing to see.

Jason Whit­lock nails it in his lat­est on this issue:

Hey, what Imus said, call­ing the Rut­gers play­ers “nappy-headed hos,” was igno­rant, insen­si­tive and offen­sive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.Imus’ words did no real dam­age. Let me tell you what dam­aged us this week: the sports cover of Tuesday’s USA Today. This country’s news­pa­per of record pub­lished a story about the NFL and crime and ran a pic­ture of 41 NFL play­ers who were arrested in 2006. By my count, 39 of those play­ers were black.You want to talk about a dam­ag­ing, pow­er­ful image, an image that went out across the globe?We’re hold­ing news con­fer­ences about Imus when the behav­ior of NFL play­ers is paint­ing us as law­less and immoral. Come on. We can do bet­ter than that. Jesse and Al are smarter than that.

Noth­ing Imus said was that shock­ing, con­sid­er­ing the source. And yet, the Jesse Jack­sons and the Al Sharp­tons of the world are call­ing for his head, with Barack Obama and oth­ers close behind. This is the sad state we find our world, one where some­one like Imus who as recently as last week, CBS paid big bucks to say out­landish and some­times offen­sive things, gets fired while black artists say hor­ri­ble things about black women all the time and no one bats an eye.

It’s sad and it’s ridicu­lous and I’m not sure what can be done to change it.