Imus: media hypocrisy

21 April 2007 |permalink | email article

A Thursday column by David Broder in The Washington Post definitively exposed the troubling role of establishment journalism in two messy stories that have come to dominate recent news – the firing of Don Imus and the phony Duke lacrosse rape case.

Of the two, the venerable political writer said the Imus story is the far worse and more gratuitous as both CBS Radio and MSNBC fired the foul mouthed shock-jock host only after his racist slur on the Rutgers women’s basketball escalated and major advertisers bailed out.

“It showed no courage on the part of those organizations, which had put up with similar slurs over the years and counted themselves lucky to have such a moneymaking act in their stable.”

Admitting that he had never heard Imus’s broadcasts because he is a longtime fan of NPR’s “Morning Edition” which airs at the same time, Broder said he was stunned to learn “how many journalists I admire had been regular guests on the program.”

Many of them, he pointed out, had heard Imus ridicule and insult women, gays, African Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Catholics and others. “Some had been targets of his unfunny slurs and came back for more.”

The claim that journalists’ participation in Imus’s slanders were the price they had to pay in return for using his forum for their ideas “doesn’t wash.”

Broder offers a simple lesson for journalists which, he asserts, some stubbornly refuse to acknowledge.

“When professional journalists lend their credibility to entertainers or others whose standards are far lower than those of news organizations for which those journalist work, they not only damage their credibility but also diminish the standards they are supposed to embody.”

For me, Broder’s admonition should be pressed even more specifically. Former newspaperman Ernest Hemingway once told The Paris Review: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar.”

 

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