Tag: Radio
Imus Insulted a Friend of Mine on the Air
With me and Don Imus it is personal, and it has been since he trashed my friend Jacqueline Lennon live on MSNBC early one morning in February 2000.
Imus called R&R “cheesy” and trashed one of its staff members on national television because the radio industry trade paper had had the gall to give him a lifetime achievement award.
Jacq is an exceptionally fine R&B singer who also manages events for Radio & Records, the radio industry trade paper. That year, for reasons that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, R&R had decided to honor Imus with its Talk Radio Lifetime Achievement Award at a ceremony in Washington that month.
I only watch Imus when nothing else is on, so there I was at 5:30 in the morning, listening to him railing about R&R, which he called “cheesy,” and the award, which he seemed to think branded him a has-been prematurely. He was also upset that R&R had had the temerity to send him a form letter asking for information about credentials for his guests, I think, which was an affront to his enormous ego. He was particularly pissed off at the person who signed the letter — Jacqueline Lennon, whom he called a “moron” more than once.
I knew he was just using her as a foil for his tantrum — a convenient target for his monkeypoo. But what kind of jerk goes on national television and trashes a well-meaning staff member on an event in his honor over something so trivial?
What’s interesting here is the status of Imus’ coziness within the Gang of 500, many of whom were frequent call-in guests on his show. Today he made things worse by criticizing Brian Williams’ coverage of the story on the NBC Nightly News last night. Sponsors, including Proctor & Gambel, have already pulled ads from his shows.
Ifill on Imus: Finally Addresses Personal Insult
There’s a wonderful piece on the Dom Imus mess in today’s NYT by Gwen Ifill, once called by the insult-happy radio host “a cleaning lady.”
Ifill said she didn’t find out until five years later about the characterization, since Imus isn’t exactly on her radar screen.
I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice.
It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.
“Isn’t The Times wonderful,†Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.â€
I was taken aback but not outraged…
I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me.
It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult…
To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.
Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well.
So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.
Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.
Imus and the Media Whores
I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the “angry left” — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.
They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.
Don Imus has been behaving badly and apologizing for it for many, many years. I expect he will continue to do so once he’s finished with his two week vacation. And all of these writers will once again make pilgrimages to his show and pledge fealty to him in order to sell books. Because, unlike those great basketball players he maligned so casually — they really are whores.
Don Imus is an Okie from Riverside, Calif.
Calls for Head on a Platter After Imus Loses His Mind
That’s how radio superstar Don Imus described Rutgers University’s Scarlet Knights, after they lost the NCAA Women’s Basketball title to the University of Tennessee’s Lady Vols.
“That’s some nappy headed hos there, I’m going to tell you that,” Imus said.
“That’s some rough girls from Rutgers,” Imus said. “Man, they got tattoos …”
“Some hardcore hos,” said [Imus Show’s Producer Bernard] McGurk.
“That’s some nappy headed hos there, I’m going to tell you that,” Imus said.
As you might expect, lots of people were unhappy with the racist, sexist characterization of the college athletes.
[National Association of Black Journalists] President Bryan Monroe asked Thursday if Imus had “lost his mind” and called for the veteran radio host’s dismissal.
I agree, but I must say Imus made a good apology.
Imus said he wanted to “apologize for an insensitive and ill-conceived remark we made the other morning referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team.”
“It was completely inappropriate, and we can understand why people were offended. Our characterization was thoughtless and stupid, and we are sorry.”
So many people would have said they were apologizing to anyone they “might” have offended, as if whoever found their bad behavior offensive was the problem. At least Imus owned his backward stereotyping.
Imus, according to Wikipedia, hails from Riverside, Calif. I shudder to think what people would have made of this if he were from, say, anywhere at all in the South.
Glenn Beck: Hillary Is a ‘Stereotypical Bitch’
Glenn Beck, a less entertaining copycat of comedian Rush Limbaugh, has likened his role in the noise machine to that of a rodeo clown. Listen to him clowning around on his radio show last week:
BECK: I don’t want to sound like the old ball-and-chain guy, but Hillary Clinton cannot be elected president because — am I wrong in feeling, am I the only one in America that feels this way? — that there’s something about her vocal range. There’s something about her voice that just drives me — it’s not what she says, it’s how she says it. She is like the stereotypical — excuse the expression, but this is the way to — she’s the stereotypical bitch, you know what I mean? She’s that stereotypical, nagging, [unintelligible], you know what I mean? And she doesn’t have to be saying — she could be saying happy things, but after four years, don’t you think every man in America will go insane? Is it just me? I mean, I know this is horrible to say, but I mean it not — I would say this if she were Condi Rice and she sounded like that. Condi Rice doesn’t have that grate to her voice. You know what I need to do? I need to talk to a vocal expert, because there is a range in women’s voices that experts say is just the chalk, I mean, the fingernails on the blackboard. And I don’t know if she’s using that range or what it is, but I’ve heard her in speeches where I can’t take it.
It is hard to believe this guy is married but, according to his bio at Wikipedia, Glenn Beck is in his second marriage. He is also a former drug addict and an alcoholic, as well as a lapsed Catholic who is now a Mormon.
In addition to his radio show, Beck also hosts an hour-long show every weekday on CNN Headline News.
Air America May Have Buyer
The bankrupt parent of talk-radio network Air America is close to being bought by a group of investors led by a New York-area family, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing sources.
The French family of Westchester, New York, owner of New York City-area television concern WRNN, is leading a group of investors in a bid to buy the assets of Piquant LLC, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.
Richard French Sr. has owned WRNN since 1993.
Activists Urge Boycott of the ‘N-word’
Even a complete ban wouldn’t stop a rage-aholic like Michael Richards from spewing hate speech.
African-American leaders, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California) and Rev. Jesse Jackson, gathered in Los Angeles yesterday to urge a nationwide boycott of the use of the “n-word.”
They were reacting to the infamous “stage rage” incident on November 17 in which former television star Michael Richards was videotaped at a local comedy club shouting racial epithets at two African-American men in the audience. The leaders said they were encouraging everyone, particularly Rap artists and African-American standup comics, to “just say no” to the n-word:
“We’re not trying to penalize anyone,” Waters said at a news conference at the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper, “but don’t use the n-word, no matter who you are, whether you’re black, white, young or old.”
Jackson added: “This word is a symbol of degradation and the actions that flow from it.”
Would banning the n-word help? It is already stigmatized among the 99.99 percent of African-Americans who aren’t Rap artists or their hardcore fans. It has been verbotten in all but a small reprobate segment of what might be called the “white community” for a generation or three. This self-censorship is why it is referred to as the “n-word,” like the “f-word,” “s-word” and the other unspeakables.
The boycott may resonate among standup comics but to reach Rap artists and their fans, political and spiritual leaders need to find advocates closer to the locus than Rev. Jackson and Rep. Water — maybe producer/artists like P-Diddy or Dr. Dre.
But even with a complete ban in place, it wouldn’t stop a rage-aholic like Michael Richards from spewing hate speech when he imagined his buttons were being pushed.
