Weighing In On Imus

Politics and power are fascinating. They are the real reasons Don Imus recently lost his job. I am not going to defend what he said. I believe he should have been suspended from his job for the remarks, which initially he was. But it was the politics and power that got him fired, and that's what bugs me.
What happened seemed pretty straightforward. The statement was made, the statement made the news, Imus apologized, he apologized again, and then yet again. CBS announced a two week suspension and then it got interesting. What happened was the apology tour hit Al Sharpton's radio show.
I spent enough time in radio to know that ratings are as important to radio people as they are to the television industry. If you think Al Sharpton wasn't even thinking about the ratings he could get by getting this "racist" on his program, you'd be mistaken. He knew he'd get a huge audience and he knew how to play it once he got his guest on his show. All of a sudden, the incident became a firestorm that eventually led to the firing.
Still, angry reaction alone does not get a man fired. Politics and economic power do. Political power keeps the outrage in the news. Then, when the outraged have financial clout, they either threaten sponsor boycotts or put enough pressure on advertisers to get them to stop sponsoring. That is what really cost Imus his job.
Consider that late last year, Rosie O'Donnell got in trouble for making racial slurs towards Asians. She apologized by saying she didn't realize she was offending Asians and was sorry, but added she would also probably do something like that again. Rosie is still hosting The View and was not even given a slap on the wrist. Why? Because there was no protest with enough political or economic clout to keep the issue in the news or affect The View's profits for ABC.
If anything good has come out of this, it is the additional discussion it has generated concerning rap and hip hop lyrics, which continually use the same language Imus used and worse on a consistent daily basis. But here, economics rules again. People are buying the stuff, so the record companies are going to keep putting it out until it stops selling.
Maybe some artists will now choose to tone down their lyrics. Or maybe enough people will start complaining to radio stations and practice their economic clout and get the stations to stop programming some of the garbage and force the artists to change if they want to get heard on the radio. That's not censorship, that's self-policing and it's something that's been long overdue on our airwaves.