Shortly after 9/11, Bill Maher noted that calling the hijackers “cowards” was inaccurate since they apparently were not afraid to die.”People had better watch what they say,” said Ari Fleisher, White House press secretary, and Bill Maher lost his TV show.
In 2003, Natalie Maines said the Dixie Chicks were ashamed George W. Bush was from Texas. Conservatives protested, and the Chicks were run off of country radio.
Two weeks ago, Don Imus used a racially-charged adjective in reference to the Rutgers women’s basketball team. A lot of people protested, and Imus was fired.
What’s going on in this country? Why are so many people convinced that people who say things they don’t like should be run off the airwaves? Do we have so few radio stations that they should be limited to those who don’t offend anyone?
The anti-Imus crowd says his firing is about free markets, not free speech. But in radio, the market speaks through ratings, and MSNBC, CBS and Imus’ advertisers didn’t wait for the ratings. They heard from pressure groups and they caved.
Bill Maher has another show now. The Dixie Chicks bounced back with a Grammy-winning album. Imus will be back too (what does Comedy Central have in the mornings?). Talent finds an audience even when small minds or vested interests try to deny it a microphone.
But I worry for my country that so many people seem to think we can’t handle a diversity of words and opinions on the public airwaves. What are people afraid of?
http://www.savethema…
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Then a woman wrote back to me lambasting me for supporting
an “anti-feminist” movement.
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Google Dick Sutphen
And after that Strategic Communications Laboratories.
In your first example, the spokesman for the President of the United States warns Americans to watch what they say, or else. That’s exactly what the First Amendment is designed to protect against — the government telling people what they may and may not say. Fleischer’s comments were way out of line. Obviously, the government itself did not fire Maher, so there was no direct 1st amendment violation, but nonetheless that was a legitimate free speech issue.
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The Dixie Chicks and Imus are something entirely different — entertainers who, having made comments that their audiences found problematic, experienced Adam Smith’s invisible hand thwacking them in the face. Guess what: them’s the breaks in our more-or-less market-based economy. As you note (and as I have already noted), the Dixie Chicks have come out of it just fine, in fact, better than ever. Why? Because that incident clarified exactly who their audience really is, and also made clear just how many people were with them. Result: they can still make a lot of money for record companies and radio stations, just not necessarily the ones they started out with.
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I don’t doubt that Imus will find a new radio home, if he wants one, though it’ll almost certainly a less widely-syndicated one. Fact is, most people don’t want to listen to an old jerk who slings bigoted slurs at accomplished student athletes. Can you really blame them?
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So, as you say, “talent finds an audience.” I’d add that it finds an audience of a size commensurate to the degree of talent. The Dixie Chicks have a lot of talent, and they’ve found a very big audience despite the efforts of some to deny it to them. Imus doesn’t, IMHO; he’s been in a market too big for his talent for a long time, and a needed market correction has finally occurred. If he stays in the business, he’ll end up with an audience of a more talent-appropriate size.
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This is not about anyone being “afraid” of anything. It’s about the fact that there is a limit to the number of slots for widely-distributed (i.e., big-money generating) radio and TV shows, and that the businesses that own those slots want to be sure they’re maximizing their return with them.
No comparison is perfect, but in each of these cases (and I’m sure we could come up with more), an outraged constituency demanded an entertainer be taken off the air, and the networks and radio stations obliged.
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Yes, it is scarier when the government is making the threat, but it was Congress and the FCC who raised fines for “indecency” in the wake of Janis Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction driving Howard Stern and the like to satellite radio. The religious right has been intimidating newspeople and entertainers longer than the anti-racist left. And I’m uncomfortable with any of them telling me who I can and can’t listen to.
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As Robert Reich noted on one of the shows this morning, the FCC will soon rule on whether the two satellite radio companies can merge. With Washington watching, they may not want to give Imus the opportunity to find his audience.
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I wouldn’t be too quick to praise the virtue of the monopoly broadcast media or the national advertisers because this time they got someone you don’t like fired. They aren’t so virtuous when they conspire against progressive radio or cave to conservative pressure.
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And I wouldn’t be too quick to assume no politics came into play in the Imus case. I’m not much for conspiracy theories, and I assume the sincerity of those who were offended by Imus’ remark. But people who actually listen to the show (a small minority of those commenting on it this week) know that the line about the Rutgers women was a throwaway line, not a recurring theme. But every day, Imus called Dick Cheney a “war criminal”. Every day, he called Hillary Clinton “satan”. Is it paranoid to suspect that those powerful forces might have had a hand in pushing a powerful critic off the airwaves?
Nowhere, I believe, did I “praise the virtue” of MSNBC or CBS, or of their advertisers. I simply described what I believe happened in this case. They are businesses, and they behaved as rational businesses would behave. Imus, rather suddenly, was a liability, since he was costing the networks advertisers, so they dumped him. I’m not saying it’s “good” or “bad” that that happened — I have never listened to Imus’s show — I’m just saying it’s not a “free speech” violation, and that the result doesn’t surprise me, since Imus chose an especially sympathetic target to attack.
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I doubt that Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton had anything to do with his ouster, but maybe I’m naive. If they wanted to flex their muscles to get him off the air, surely that would have happened long ago. I don’t think Cheney called up Procter & Gamble and Staples to advise them to withdraw from the show. I think those companies bailed because they didn’t want to be associated with what happened on Imus’s show. Again, can you blame them?
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Again, Janet Jackson etc.: totally different issue. There it is the government that’s cracking down. That’s a horse of a different and much more serious color.
I do think that firing Imus was appropriate, just like I thought that firing DePetro from WRKO was appropriate. If that counts as “praising the virtue,” so be it. Those were business decisions that happened also to be the right thing to do, IMHO.
So you’re glad Imus got fired because no one else should have the opportunity to listen to a program you don’t choose to listen to?
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Just to be clear: I have no problem with anyone getting criticized or punished for what they say. It’s the effort to silence them, from whatever source, whether we’re talking about Ann Coulter or Sasha Baron Cohen or Jimmy Carter, that makes me very uneasy.
You have “no problem” with “anyone” getting “punished” for what they say? That’s exactly what happened here, isn’t it? Is it your view that it’s OK to suspend him, but not to fire him? What sense does that make?
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Personally, I do have a problem with people getting “punished” for what they say, if that punishment comes from the state. But if a private business chooses no longer to offer a particular speaker nationwide syndication after said speaker slings racist and sexist crap at a bunch of students, I can’t get too worked up.
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Look, Imus a long and well-documented history of similar comments. The guy’s history finally caught up with him; his advertisers bailed; and he got fired. No skin off my nose. If you want to twist that into my being “glad” that he got fired so that others are tragically deprived of the “opportunity” to listen to him, knock yourself out.
your title is grossly misleading. Imus can still blather and blunder as much as he wants to. Just not for a paycheck at NBC or CBS right now. do you really wish to imply that he has some entitlement to the airwaves that no one else does?
There is no entitlement to a media paycheck. But I don’t think the free market spoke in this case, since the advertisers didn’t wait for a drop in the ratings before withdrawing from the show. They responded to political pressure, and of course they are free to do so.
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The point of my original post is there seems to be a lot of political pressure these days to keep certain personalities and views off the airwaves. The far right, for instance, is ramping up pressure to get Rosie O’Donnell off The View because she’s openly gay, vocally anti-Bush and has made some comments that go “over the line.” I trust there will be no complaints here if the manage to “silence” Rosie.
you may be right that the advertisers responded to political pressure. but you also may be wrong. do you have any evidence? there seems to be zero political pressure to get other die-hard bigots off the air, such as limbaugh. i see no purge happening.
I use the term broadly, and not necessarily in a negative way. Al Sharpton led picketers outside NBC, which is certainly evidence of political pressure. Imus was condemned by politicians and commentators. I believe there were petitions and email campaigns. There are reports that employees of MSNBC, CBS and the advertisers lobbied executives to drop the show. All those constitute political pressure.
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I don’t really understand how much of their outrage is prompted solely by the “nappy-haird hos” comment or whether these are people who hated him before that commment. So the political agenda of the protesters is kind of murky.
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Imus’ politics are murky too. He has become a vicious critic of Bush, Cheney, the war, and just about everything the administration does. His political favorites (McCain, Kerry, Santorum, Ford, Guiliani) come in all varieties. He hates Hillary and says so on the air every day.
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I have no evidence that anyone connected with the Bushies or the Clintons did anything to add fuel to this fire, but getting Imus off the air has to be good news, especially to Hillary, in the middle of a campaign.
Imus will be back too (what does Comedy Central have in the mornings?).
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If memory serves, Comedy Central is owned by Viacom. Viacom is the parent company of CBS, which just canned Don “I’m An Ass” In The Morning. It’s highly doubtful that one branch of Viacom would pick him up after another branch didn’t.
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I don’t listen to Imus regularly*, but from what I have read, this reference to the Rutgers women basketball team was the latest in a long string of racist, sexist, anti-semitic and homophobic comments that he made on the air. And, that, after he was “suspended” at a conference over the matter he went on to make other anti-semitic remarks. As far as I’m concerned that was stupid. And it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
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The problem that you have is that advertisers don’t want to be associated with him, and, in an advertising-driven media, as a result the syndicators won’t want to be associated with him. Someone on another web site suggested that he might land a contract with satellite radio, but that is advertising-driven, too (we have Sirius).
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*I did listen to him out of curiousity a couple of times for a few minutes on the way to the gym. I did not understand his allure.
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Unlike David, I am not going to opine as to whether or not “I’m An Ass In The Morning” should have been fired: that is up to his advertisers and his syndicators. What I am going to tell you is that what Imus called the Rutgers womens basketball team (“nappy headed hos) was not only racist but it was also potentially libelous. “Ho” is slang for “whore.” “Whore” is not racist–there are white hos, and even some male ones–but the term can be libelous. When you are a syndicator that has a 60-some-odd year broadcaster who has such diarrhea of the mouth and obvious constipation of the brain that he would say something that is potentially libelous, you have a problem. Sever the relationship, and problem solved. And that’s what they did.