Imus Said Publicly What Many Media Elites Say Privately

By Monday, April 16, appearing on CNN, an all Imus buddy panel, including John Roberts, Paul Begala, and James Carville, engaged in a tribute to Imus. All that was needed were champagne glasses. On the same day John Roberts and his colleague, Wolf Blitzer, described the murder of 31 students at Virginia Tech as "the worst massacre in American history"--ignoring mass killings of blacks and Indians that had been far worse. Moreover, the fact that the shooter Cho Seung-Hui, was a fan of Guns N' Roses--he named a play, "Mr. Brownstone," after one of the band's songs--didn't inspire the 24/7 castigation of white Heavy Metal music that was dealt to Hip Hop music in the wake of Don Imus' firing.

The President of NBC News, Steve Capus, was disingenuous when he claimed that Don Imus, the shock jock, was fired solely because employees at NBC were outraged at Imus' description of the members of the Rutgers women's basketball team as "Nappy Headed Hos." That might have been part of it. But it was the multibillion dollar purchasing power of African-Americans and organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists, a more difficult target for Imus' fans than Sharpton and Jackson, that gave the African-American community its greatest victory against a racist media that have been its bane since the first slave ships arrived. Before television and radio, it was the newspapers alone that raised lynch mobs on African-Americans. In Charles Chesnutt's novels, The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel's Dream (1905), the villains are newspaper men. The inflammatory coverage of one led to a lynching. The other editor caused a race riot. A book, The Betrayal of the Negro by Rayford Whittingham Logan, indicts some of the nation's most prestigious newspapers for inciting civil strife during the 20th Century, based upon malicious and false reporting.

The "National Dialogue" that MSNBC held after the Imus outburst about the Rutgers team was a telling example of this historic trend. The so-called "dialogue" was dominated mostly by white talking heads, including white women, who seem to be prospering at MSNBC, receiving as much airtime as the men. (Even so, Gloria Steinem maintained, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that white middle-class women and blacks share the same social predicament. Really? The college enrollment of white women is higher than that of both white men and blacks.) Instead of the opinions of black academic feminists like bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Sandra O'Neale, Paula Giddings, Joyce Joyce, or Sonia Sanchez being solicited to comment about Imus' remarks, Naomi Wolfe, a white feminist, whom bell hooks has criticized, spoke on behalf of black women.

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