Tag: Imus

Imus and the First Amendment

This is last week’s commentary from the First Amendment Center on the Imus nonsense (how I managed to miss this is beyond me). It seems the most sensible thing I’ve read, recognizing the First-Amendment rights both of the offenders and the offended:

(T)he most immediate answer to highly offensive speech is simply to stop enabling it. Change the channel, boycott the sponsor, or go to another Web site. We should do everything we can to protect the First Amendment right of people to offend, but we don’t have to pay for it.

Pretty much sums up my thoughts.

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Filtered images

Matthew Yglesias offers an interesting deconstruction of the attempts to link the Duke rape case to the Imus controversy. Like Yglesias, I have avoided writing about Duke — primarily because it was an ongoing police investigation and information was constantly in flux. And like him, I was struck by the attempts of some to dismiss the Imus controversy and its ugly racial elements by tossing the Duke case onto the table.

For months, …, every time I blog on anything even vaguely race-related, I’m struck by the sheer volume of people who want to respond “what about the Duke lacrosse case?” Well, I think, what about it? Then I read something like this from Victor Davis Hanson who really doesn’t cover these issues either, and it hits me. There’s this huge block of people out there, primarily reasonably prosperous middle-aged middle class white men, who in all genuineness seem to believe that what went down there is emblematic of broad-based social problem. They see the Imus controversy through the same lens — the lens that makes them think the issue here is Al Sharpton or hip-hop. It’s a mentality that believes — deeply and sincerely — that the middle-aged white dude just can’t get a fair shake in this country.

My sense, after this week, is that Yglesias’ depiction of the race filter is accurate. Much of the defense of Imus — and of others who have made race-denigrating coments — plays off this attitude.

That it doesn’t reflect reality, however, that white middle-class men are not a put upon class, not as a class, anyway.

If white middle-class men feel they aren’t getting a fair shake — and they aren’t — they should get together with all the rest of those not getting a fair shake and hold the people in power accountable.

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Frank Rich on Imus

I stand by my reaction to the Imus firing — it was warranted as a business decision that came as a reaction to more and better speech unlike the Bill Maher incident which came as a reaction to criticism from the administration — but I wanted to pass along this column from Frank Rich. Rich has some ambivalence on this — he calls himself a free-speech near absolutist (I would characterize myself in the same way — but I think he gives short shrift to the notion that speech has its consequences. forget what CBS and MSNBC said about this, the firing was about money and the decision by the money makers had everything to do with the surprisingly widespread public outcry.

Imus can still go to satellite, perhaps even Fox. There remain outlets and there remain listeners for his brand of unfunny humor. But free-speech does not require CBS or MSNBC from providing him the forum.

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