It details these "Fairness Doctrine Days" and is deserving of a movie, although I don't envision Clooney doing it.
I'm now listening to an audio stream of Imus from 1972 (1st anniversary in New York) with lots of controversial comment including one guy telling Imus that prostitution should be legal. Chuck McCord was doing the news back then, too. And he has a lispy gay phony newscaster.
Of course, many of us have become leery of First Amendment protection, due to the trashers (Piss Christ, etc - ad nauseum)
So Johnson was behind the fairness doctrine and getting churches under the IRS.
Imus got was coming to him, just like Whoopi was expelled from Slim Fast when she made Jackass comments about the President. Money talks! And when masses of customers are fed up with certain diatribes, it is their Constitutional Right to respond.
Imus is just another example of what happens to white people who make the mistake of offending the black folks.
Imus was a liberal and definitely has nothing against black people. In fact i am sure heb would lean over backwards to be helpful to most black organisations.
Howard Cosell who was another white man that was tossed aside because of blacks being offended was a great fan of black sports figures. He helped make Cassious Clay a personality, helped hiom become famous and always pushed black sports figures as being great. Yet they tossed all Howards good works aside and attacked him for a small offhand remark.
Imus was making what he thought was a joke,.But he made it about the wrong race. had he made it about whites ,polish , irish most any other race or sect he would have gotten away.
No he stepped in the dog doo that is black offense.
So he’s gone and we wonder who will be next.
One thing is certain the ones who need to be taken to task for this Al & Jesse wont be bothered. They will go on race baiting and not only allowed to get away with it , they will be praised for it.
Social conservatives have been asking the popular liberal culture, in various ways and in various venues for a long, long time, have you no decency. The liberal culture has reacted by castigating conservatives as only wanting to “impose” values on society or wanting to destroy free speech.
Imus has the right to say what he did. In doing so, he must take responsibility for society finally waking up to what a horrible thing he really said. Thankfully this has provoked society into a self-examination of the consistency and values that were being expressed and these values have (finally) been shown to be lacking in the very values that the left thinks are theirs alone to protect and advance.
The Fairness Doctrine is disconnected from the Imus Hoe Flap. The Left counts Iums as one of its own. If he is allowed to come back, or if a replacement for him is found, that person will be allowed to say the same things that Imus has been saying for years, except this one area will now be off limits. The Fairness Doctrine is not aimed at the Left, it is aimed at every other voice on talk radio.
Happily, we now have the internet, and internet radio. We also have internet streaming media being delivered to cell phones, which are like the portable transistor radios of the 60’s generation. Increasingly, with ever expansion of the internet in wireless forms, it will be easier and easier for alternatives to Big Broadcast Networks and the gatekeepers who have stationed themselves on that media, to spring up.
Like Matt Drudge, who started off with a cheap PC and a dialup connection, anyone with very simple equipment and an almost-free connection to the net can produce his own program of commentary or news and make it available to web sites and forums that would be receptive to it. There is nothing that anyone who doesn’t like it will be able to do to stop that person.
Let free speech bloom, and screw the self-appointed gatekeepers.
if a democrap wins the 2008 election
an attack on the fairness doctrine is a given.
i hear too many women that i know that watch oprah and rosie
saying that “rush limbaugh and ann coulter shouldn’t be saying
those things”.
Imus isn’t being censored any more than are the Dixie Chicks. He’s free to say what he wants, and his audience is free to turn the channel. His employers are free to call him on the carpet, or even make a show of firing him, if they fear enough people are turning the station.
Its business.
I don’t listen to Dixie Chick songs when they come on the radio, and the radio station knows it, so they don’t play them. I stopped lisening to Imus years ago after he went off on Christians one day (if you don’t like what I’m saying, he said, turn the station, and I did, permanently).
What he said in this case was over the line, and I’m not surprised there are consequences, not legal ones, but business ones, you can’t stay in business if your listeners don’t listen and your advertisers don’t want to be associated with you. Thats not censorship, though. Its the reason producers have to think twice before using Sean Penn in one of their movies, since there are any number of people who won’t buy the ticket if he’s in it.
That is nothing to do with Fairness Doctrine, though. You are right, though, in observing that getting rid of Limbaugh is priority one for the Dems, from the moment they retake the White House. Had Clinton had a few more months in office before, they would have taken Limbaugh out, and they will stop at nothing until he is gone, should they win big in 2008. You can count on it. That has nothing to do with Imus, though. If Imus were going down over “Fairness”, I’d defend him. He’s going down because he used racial epithets that would get my kids a bar of soap in the mouth if they used them. I have no patience for anyone who talks like that, period. Its not censorship, though, its called turning the station.
bookmark
The bottom line is that Imus’ ratings were so miniscule that he wasn’t worth saving. Howard Stern can get away with saying outrageous things, because he has the listeners.
This Imus garbage is about dumping Rush and Savage and re-instituting government control of the content of radio and TV broadcasts, sometimes known as the “Fairness Doctrine”
Cogent and to the point. Also, absolutely right. Well written.
btt
That bit about the preacher broadcasting a poem in which a dog urinates on Dr. King's grave is illuminating. It provides a stark contrast of the racist speech controversies of today versus those in the latter half of the 20th century, and puts the lie to the notion that things haven't changed.
What has changed? Well, nobody can get away with calling black women whores on the air unless they are black themselves. Not really progress, but at least now it's not a dog pissing on King's grave, it's a Dogg (as in Snoop).