Don Imus is een radiopresentator die zich graag opstelt als een rechtse boerelul met een cowboyhoed op, sorry er is geen ander woord voor. Hij is er bij NBC uitgewerkt.
Isaiah J. Poole is the executive editor of TomPaine.com.
Soon, the Don Imus groveling and penitence tour sparked by his jaw-dropping description of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ‘hos” will come to an end. And then what?
Does Imus say, in the words that the Rev. Al Sharpton used when Imus appeared on his radio show Monday, “let’s get past that, go on to the next commercial, and I live to curse another day”?
If the past is any guide, that is a sure bet. Imus has a long and sordid history of trafficking in racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. And a lot of people who consider themselves reputable—both Democratic and Republican politicians, political consultants, journalists and pundits—have shacked up in this seedy AM radio motel as if it were a five-star forum for serious political discourse. They knew better, as did the advertisers who bankrolled this enterprise and the networks that broadcast it. They have no one to blame but themselves for the soil on their own images as a result, and for whatever consequences they face if they go back in.
Imus keeps saying that he is a “good person” who said “a bad thing,” but that’s not the full truth.
As far back as 2000, TomPaine.com was chronicling the sewage spewing from Imus’ microphone in a series of articles by Philip Nobile and others that reached back into programs that aired years before. TomPaine.com published an ad in The New York Times and even bought time on Imus’ show to raise the issue, and Nobile wrote an article in 2000 for the Columbia Journalism Review.
In one article posted May 16, 2000, Nobile wrote,
Just about anything goes—from saying that [African-American former basketball player] Larry Johnson ruined [white female TV news personality] Willow Bay for white men, to asking the borough president of the Bronx if he felt “like the mayor of Mogadishu.” Epithets like “brillohead,” “dark meat,” “dingos,” “mandingos,” and “Uncle Ben” are okay on Imus.'
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