Go Tell It on the Mountain…
April 14th, 2007 by 
Caroline Spector
Disclaimer: My geriatric cat, Floyd, woke me up about six times last night wanting to be fed. (The cat food is placed up high where the dog can’t get to it. But this means that my decrepit cat can’t jump high enough to get to the food anymore. I pick him up all day long and place him with his food. Now he expects me to get up all night long and put him with his food . . . and yet, he still lives.) I am punchy as hell, so I have no idea how this is going to come out.
Well, thank goodness our long national nightmare is over. Don Imus has been fired. There’s one less crapulous, geriatric dickweed on the air.
Now, I could care less about Don Imus. I’ve never listened to him, and the crotchety, hate-filled shtick that got him fired is pretty much the same crotchety, hated-filled shtick he’s been doing for the last 30 years.
I trolled around a number of websites the other day, curious to see what the hoi polloi have been saying. There’s a veritable wave of, “That’s just so wrong. Why, we have freedom of speech in this country.”
Yes, we do have freedom of speech.
But what we don’t have is freedom from the consequences of freedom of speech.
Especially not while you’re on someone else’s dime.
You see, as long as Imus was raking in money for CBS, they were happy as clams to peddle his vitriol. But the shit-storm around this incident wouldn’t go away. And that meant that their sponsors were feeling the heat. And in corporate Amurika, they don’t give a fuck what you say, as long as they can make a buck off of it.
Imus’s sin wasn’t calling the Rutgers’ Woman’s Basketball Team “nappy-headed hos.” It was in costing his advertisers potential sales.
Below is a transcript from the part of the show where the lovely comment was made. You know what’s amazing — how utterly ignorant and insipid this exchange is. It says volumes about the people who listen to Imus that they find this stuff entertaining. Were I forced to listen to this, I would be convinced I was in Hell.
IMUS: So, I watched the basketball game last night between — a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women’s final.
ROSENBERG: Yeah, Tennessee won last night — seventh championship for [Tennessee coach] Pat Summitt, I-Man. They beat Rutgers by 13 points.
IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and –
McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.
IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like — kinda like — I don’t know.
McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.
IMUS: Yeah.
McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes — that movie that he had.
IMUS: Yeah, it was a tough –
McCORD: Do The Right Thing.
McGUIRK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
IMUS: I don’t know if I’d have wanted to beat Rutgers or not, but they did, right?
ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.
IMUS: Well, I guess, yeah.
RUFFINO: Only tougher.
McGUIRK: The [Memphis] Grizzlies would be more appropriate.
Do I think freedom of speech has been given a fatal blow by the firing of Don Imus? Hardly. Imus can still go stand on a street corner and continue saying all the same crap he’s been saying for the past 30 years. And if he was arrested for that, I’d be massively pissed. But to lose his multi-million-dollar-a-year job with a national broadcaster — well, I won’t be crying a river.
He’s a dick. And his viewpoints are straight out of the 18th century. And his level of discourse is that of the schoolyard bully. No great loss to the public airwaves, at least not by my standards.
Your mileage may vary.
Posted in Caroline, Daily Life, People, Politics, Pop. Culture | 
April 14th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Perfect. This happens to cross correlate with the recent and ongoing mess concerning the death threats received by Kathy Sierra.
For those who don’t know Ms. Sierra’s work, she did an incredibly popular blog on technology issues called Creating Passionate Users. As a result of these death threats she’s canceled a keynote speech she was giving at the eTech conference and she’s seriously considering giving up blogging.
The death threats were graphic both verbally and visually. They included photoshopped images of her having pretty horrible things done to her starting with fatal violence and proceeding to sexual assault.
What’s really disturbing to me is a)the enormous number of people who say “grow a thicker skin,” we can’t censor the internet, you gotta accept free speech you dislike if you want to have free speech and b)a set of respected opponents of her started a web site before this for pretty much the purpose of making fun of her. All of this was “free speech” but it really seems that these death threats were an escalation of this other behavior. Not that these guys are doing the death threats but that they certainly lowered the bar of civilized behavior prior to the death threats.
I’m waiting for them to catch the asshole(s) who issued the death threats and images. I want him to receive the consequences of free speech.
April 14th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Steve,
I’ve heard about the Kathy Sierra situation, and what your talking about is criminal behavior. Death threats are not protected speech. And, sadly, there will always be sick fucks who are set off by godonlyknowswhat.
I also dislike intensely the kind of talk radio that Imus/Limbaugh/Savage propagate.
Buuuuut, the reason Imus was fired had little to do with the actually offensiveness of his invective — Jesus, you should have seen some of the posts about this I’ve read that are so far beyond the realms of good taste as to make even Ann Coulter blush — but about the economic reality suddenly visited upon CBS and their advertisers.
I cut the line from this post about the fact that conservatives were the first to use the whole “you have to accept the consequences of free speech” when they were censoring people like the Dixie Chicks. You sow the wind…
Sadly, it’s all too easy to ONLY hear opinions that agree with our own on the Internet now. In fact, I’m convinced that some people cannot bear to have any exposure to opinions that differ from their own.
April 14th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
I just did a REPORT on James Baldwin! He’s the one who wrote “Go tell it on the Mountain”.
April 15th, 2007 at 12:53 am
I wonder how long it will be before Imus has a new show on Fox News.
April 15th, 2007 at 9:25 am
And here I’d thought he’d end up on satellite like Howard Stern.
April 15th, 2007 at 10:52 am
As Caroline points out, it’s about the money. If Fox or the satellite networks think they can make piles of cash by hiring Imus, they will.
Fox, dependent on advertisers, probably won’t touch him — since the reason CBS fired him was the fact that advertisers were bailing.
Satellite — well, it would depend on whether they thought he had enough Loyal Listeners willing to shell out their own cash to hear him mumble his insults. A pretty big gamble.
Stern was in a different position. No advertisers were bailing on his “terrestrial radio” show, and he wasn’t fired. And while he doesn’t have anywhere near the audience on satellite that he had before, he’s still made Sirius (and himself) a heap of dough.
Which is the name of the game.
April 15th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
See Mark Cuban on Imus, Caroline.
April 15th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I’m finding it fascinating that the Left, perhaps following the elections, seems to have the taste of blood in its mouth.
Instead of just whining about the bastards who are killing us, we’re starting to kill back.
I like it.
Payback is indeed a bitch.
April 16th, 2007 at 6:06 am
Never heard him. Sure has the most evil face I’ve ever seen on a human being, though.
Payback is circular, and degenerative. This is a common theme I hammer on. News at 11.
April 16th, 2007 at 8:50 am
I do agree with you, Alden, that payback can create a vicious cycle. But there has been a very, very long period during which liberals have been typecast as evil, effeminate enemies of the state. I do think we are all going to need to step back from the brink, but it’s going to have to happen together.
As long as people like Coulter, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and Malkin are being given platforms to spew toxic nonsense to millions of people, we are going to push back. We’re sick and tired of having our values, our patriotism, and even our very humanity impugned in the national media, day after day.