Robinson on Imus
Eugene Robinson on Imus' current dilemma:
It's that intimacy that usually isolates radio people from the impact of their words. To them, they might as well be talking out loud during their shower. The twist, or course, is that they depend on a vast audience in order for them to keep broadcasting their thoughts on the airwaves.
Add that to the fact that many radio shows have a demographic that even they aren't aware of (I'm sure Imus has black listeners, at least before this incident) and that dependence on the audience potentially magnifies.
All radio personalities, not just Imus, need to keep this in mind.
But I'd rather lock him in a room with the parents of those Rutgers kids and let him try to explain himself. I'm not sure that kicking him off the air would accomplish much of anything, since there would still be plenty of morning radio jocks spewing racism, misogyny and other forms of cruelty for the amusement of gridlock-bound commuters. Howard Stern, another radio superstar who has expanded into television, recently held a degrading "Miss Black Howard Stern" contest.
Drive-time radio has become a free-fire zone, a forum for crude and objectionable speech that would be out of bounds anywhere else. There's an intimacy about radio. The medium creates the illusion of privacy -- it's just the jock and his or her entourage speaking to you, the listener, alone in your car where nobody else can hear.
It's that intimacy that usually isolates radio people from the impact of their words. To them, they might as well be talking out loud during their shower. The twist, or course, is that they depend on a vast audience in order for them to keep broadcasting their thoughts on the airwaves.
Add that to the fact that many radio shows have a demographic that even they aren't aware of (I'm sure Imus has black listeners, at least before this incident) and that dependence on the audience potentially magnifies.
All radio personalities, not just Imus, need to keep this in mind.
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