Imus' Comments

[ardillacid]

So why exactly has everyone been so bothered by what this guy said? He is a SHOCK JOCK after all, I mean, people listen to them to hear offensive commentary.

[Thy Geekdom Come]

There should be no job market for shock jocks in the first place. They're entire business consists of butting into other people's business, making crude comments, and dehumanizing individuals.

I think they should all be fired or change their ways.

[Lil Red]

so do you consider Glenn Beck a 'shock jock'? Some people do (although I don't)

[desertwoman]

The ladies didn't appreciate it, the coach was eloquent in her speech and didn't appreciate it, and I'm kinda glad it happened cause it got the ball rolling in other areas as well.

[Katholikos]

If these guys are gonna avoid penalties for insulting ppl, they need to be careful about which ppl they insult. Catholics and their Church are the only fair game left. Jews, homosexuals, Irish, Italians, Blacks, and the like are no longer safe targets. Catholics? Sure. It's the only safe prejudice left in America. Nobody needs to care what kind of outrage they commit against the Catholic Church and its members. They all pile on.

Likos

[Sojourner]

[quote name='Katholikos' post='1256245' date='Apr 25 2007, 04:41 PM']If these guys are gonna avoid penalties for insulting ppl, they need to be careful about which ppl they insult. Catholics and their Church are the only fair game left. Jews, homosexuals, Irish, Italians, Blacks, and the like are no longer safe targets. Catholics? Sure. It's the only safe prejudice left in America. Nobody needs to care what kind of outrage they commit against the Catholic Church and its members. They all pile on.

Likos[/quote]
"vertically challenged" people are also fair game. Opie & Anthony used to have "midget sightings" and there was no talk of banning/fining/suspending them

[homeschoolmom]

I think Christians in general are seen as fair game. Evangelicals certainly take more than their fair share of name calling. Catholics are probably just more visible.

[hoosieranna]

I think, maybe in this specific case, Imus missed the difference between satire and cruelty. Satire can be useful because it can point out absurdities and get a intelligent discussion started. Cruelty humiliates a person for something they cannot change, whether they desire to or not.

I love a good satire. Solzhenitsyn in "The First Circle" parodies Stalin mercilessly and it just works. I don't love cruelty. That is my take on it, at least.

[Sojourner]

[quote name='Nadezhda' post='1256340' date='Apr 25 2007, 06:20 PM']I think, maybe in this specific case, Imus missed the difference between satire and cruelty. Satire can be useful because it can point out absurdities and get a intelligent discussion started. Cruelty humiliates a person for something they cannot change, whether they desire to or not.

I love a good satire. Solzhenitsyn in "The First Circle" parodies Stalin mercilessly and it just works. I don't love cruelty. That is my take on it, at least.[/quote]
I think you are right. Quite insightful.

[CatholicCid]

I wonder if Executive Producer Bernard McGuirk got fired as well. Anyone know?

And well, honestly, he's a shock jock. His job is to say shocking things... Was this his worst comment ever? I don't know, but from some play backs I've heard, he's said things just as bad if not worse in the past. At least he was willing to go right out and apologize when he realized he offended people.

I wonder how this will effect his charity work. After getting everyone so roused up, seems like the news doesn't want to mention that work of his too much.

Edited April 26, 2007 by CatholicCid

[RezaMikhaeil]

It's difficult because we allow Howard Stern to continue, Tom Likus and others that talk about the most crude things, and even curse out their critics on the air [for likus its frequently]. Why was what Imus said to threatening? I'm afraid that alot of black politians [Jesse Jackson, Sharpton, etc] have used this particular situation for their own agenda [the evil white man]. I'm asking the question, what about all the black entertainers that have spit a million times more racist slurs then what Imus said? Nobody cares about them? What about the rappers that call black women vulgar slurs? Revrend Sharpton and Jackson don't say nothing about that, but rather support it probably.

The sad part was that Imus made his comments within the context of very masculine women with tattoos, and it was his personal interpretation incomparison to the other team that appeared to be more feminine women from his interpretation. It wasn't a deliberate comment to hurt, while alot of black entertainers spit lines to intentionally insult other races, but we don't call them racist? Imus [long before this situation] had helped black people [through charity, among other areas] more then most of the black people accusing him of being racist, anyone else see the hypocracy? Jesse Jackson likes to talk a pretty game but that's all the dude does is talk! Who's really helping black people get out of poverty?

Reverend Sharpton has spit racist slurs towards white folks time and time again, yet he's accusing Imus of being racist and demanding that he lose his radio show? What kinda sick hypocracy!

Now I do believe that we should have some restraint, that offending and deliberate hurting insults should be kept from the radio atmosphere to a great extent but what is the extent? If you remove the freedom of speech element, it has a posetive affect of making people educate themselves and practice restraint so not everything that comes out of their mouth is just garbage but it also can suppress a demographic of people.

[Aloysius]

To me, Imus's comments were satirical of how people refer to young women nowadays amongst their own age group. It wasn't meant as an insult; from what I understand it, it was in the context of a compliment, something like "not bad for 'nappy headed hos' "

seems to me 'hos' is how African Americans of that selfsame age group would refer to girls. the ONLY reason Don Imus was called out for it was because he was not a black man in his 20's or a rapper. it seems to me to have been very poignant satire; it sounded to me from the context of his words that his sentiment would be more accurately represented if he had said "not bad for types who are viewed as "nappy headed hos" by their peers"

in any event, what the whole controversy did was mobilize two distinct segments of outrage: African Americans who are always looking for some form of racism to be angry at as a scapegoat, and people of traditional mindsets who do not realize how much the word 'ho' has become seemingly acceptable and still have the sensibilities to be offended by it.

if I'm wrong about his sentiments, someone please point me to where he said he actually considered these girls to be "nappy headed hos". he called them by the appellation given them by their peers AS A REFERENCE to that appellation from their peer group and its ridiculousness. as it were, the term in his statement should have had quotes; you can almost see him putting air-quotes around the phrase if he was doing a commentary in front of a group of people who could see him.

if nothing else, his profuse apologizing should not have fell on deaf ears; he should not have been slaughtered as a scapegoat when the people who are really doing stuff with real racist sentiments and real evil motivations are allowed free reign.

[Azriel]

I heard a caller on a radio show in our area that said something that made me think:

If Imus had ragged on a male basketball player the same way - no one would have batted an eye.

[track2004]

Oprah the other day had some really interesting discussion on the subject. Imus said that rappers say it all the time, and while just blaming people is bad, he has a point. The two sides to that argument though are very intersting. On one hand people shouldn't say things like that about people even if it is a culturally acceptable thing (as some things are within certain communities but are not with outgroups ie the n word and other slurs). But on the other side rappers are speaking about what they know in a way they know, so it seems unfair to censor their lives.

In the end I think this will always be a problem because people from outgroups will say something that they've heard the ingroup say and it won't be okay. Part of the responsibility lies in the ingroups, but part also lies in the outgroups. Just becase 50 Cent says something doesn't mean it's okay for me to (I'm a 20something, white, college coed), but that doesn't mean it's great for him to have said it in the first place. So just because Imus said it, says something both about him and about the culture we live in.

[Socrates]

This is just another absurd example of the runaway political correctness and hypocrisy of the media establishment.

Imus made a career out of making tasteless and offensive comments, yet, as is typical, no one cares unless one of the major politically-sensitive lobbies gets "offended".
No one in the media powers-that-be bats an eye if a media personality insults say, Catholics, Christians, or Republicans, for instance, but God help us if someone provokes the wrath of Jackson, Sharpton & co.

And as was said, Imus was merely tongue-and-cheek mimicking the the talk common in the "hip-hop culture" with rappers and wannabes going on endlessly about "hos" and "niggaz." Yet if anyone complains about that, he is immediately dismissed as an ultra-conservative fuddy-duddy prude, or maybe even a "racist."

And the stuff about "ingroups" and "outgroups" is largely nonsensical and hypocritical. How are the p.c. sensitivity police to accurately determine who exactly is in what "ingroup" and "outgroup", or whether or not they are truly "speaking of what they know"? This becomes nothing but double standards - if a term or kind of talk is offensive in public, the same rules should apply to everybody.

Our modern liberal culture has become a model of hypocrisy - celebrating every kind of vulgarity and offensiveness as "free speech" and "liberation" and condemning any form of censorship, yet at the same time applying rigid codes of political correctness regarding certain groups.

All that was going on here was politics and p.c. piety.

Edited April 26, 2007 by Socrates