Never Apologize
That’s the unfortunate lesson of the whole Imus flap. Of course his remarks were uncivil — that’s the whole point of talk radio, which is about the lowest form of discourse imaginable. If you had to fire any radio blowhard to said something offensive (politically incorrect or not), there would be no talk radio. Imus tried to emulate a human being, however, by apologizing — and I get the impression that he was at least a little sincere and not just pandering to his hypersensitive colleagues in the media. It was the decent thing to do, but not only did it fail to conciliate Al Sharpton (big surprise there!), it prolonged the entire episode and was turned into an admission of guilt — guilt, that is, of the most heinous thoughtcrime imaginable.
Needless to say, it doesn’t do wonders for race relations when whites who apologize for saying offensive things about blacks find themselves excommunicated from the human species regardless. But does Al Sharpton care about that? I’m sure he does: the worse race relations are, the better for him. And yet it’s Al Sharpton who still has a radio show.
The best commentary I’ve seen on the flap is Pat Buchanan’s new column (and I’m not saying that because I used to work for the magazine he co-founded), though I wish he hadn’t used lynching a metaphor. I’ve done that in the past myself, which I regret — but no apologies.
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April 24th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
What the Imus affair unveiled is the hypocrisy of the Corporate media…NBC is owned by Viacom, which owns VH1 and MTV, which has has popularized dysfunctional urban Black male culture, and by the way, made MILLIONS doing so. Unfortunaely, the rhetoric of RAP and Hip-Hop has become part of America’s culture, and we can thank the big media tycoons for a major role in this transformation.
So, when Identity Politics hacks like Al Sharpton hopped on the IMUS comments as their latest self-promoting publicity project, what do the big media tycoons do—blame IMUS for ‘white racism”.
The fact that IMUS was a show that catered to the stereotypical middle-aged white male point of view —IOW, “conservative”—was just more proof that corporate media likes to blame others for their own lack of personal responsibility.
As long as the government doesn’t do anything to break up the media conglomerates, irresponsible media tycoons can continue to exploit race, sex and violence for profit, and blame the mainstream for the problems they created.