Page 515 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Shock Jocks: Mak ng Mayhem over the A rwaves

media other than radio, publishing books and appearing in films or on record-
ings. Each maintains a loyal and considerable following as well as receives some
of the highest salaries in broadcasting.
None of them continue, however, without opposition or outcry. The phe-
nomenon of the shock jock certainly has been a mainstay of columnists and
op-ed writers for some time, and many individuals need only the slightest prov-
ocation to bang the drum about these men’s latest foolhardiness or faux pas.
Most notably, the comedian Al Franklin published a best seller, Rush Limbaugh
Is a Big Fat Idiot, in 1996 and subsequently achieved his own on-air slot with
Air America as a proponent of the liberal opposition. At the same time, sanc-
tions of a more serious nature have been threatened against shock jocks. Stern
in particular tussled repeatedly with the FCC, and some feel that part of the
reason he signed up with the satellite system Sirius radio in 2006 was in order
to circumvent the restrictions applied to terrestrial broadcasting. For the most
part, these broadcasters continue in their established modes of calculated of-
fense, engaging their fans as broadcasting’s bad boys and shocking their detrac-
tors as near-criminal abusers of the public airwaves.

Crash anD Burn
The phenomenon of shock jocks in general and Don Imus in particular oc-
cupied a brief but heated news cycle in April 2007. For years, Imus committed
and subsequently apologized for a number of definitely offensive and debatably
funny comments that amounted to little more than sophomoric exercises in sex-
ism and racism. From referring to the African American journalist Gwen Ifill as
a “cleaning lady” to characterizing Arabs as “ragheads” to denigrating the Afri-
can American sports columnist Bill Rhoden as a “New York Times quota hire,”
Imus has engaged for years in a free-for-all of invective. While one might argue
that these comments amount to protected speech in the service of comedy, al-
beit a fairly sophomoric category of comedy, they nonetheless come across as
hurtful, possibly hateful, and certainly mean-spirited.
One of the paradoxes of Imus as a personality, however, remains that this
schoolyard potty mouth coexists in a kind of Jekyll-Hyde or symbiotic rela-
tionship, depending upon one’s perspective, with a thoughtful, well-prepared,
and consistently intelligent interviewer. Many individuals who frequent Imus’s
microphones praise him as one of the most astute and committed commentators
on the public airwaves; New York Times columnist Frank Rich repeated these
remarks at the climax of Imus’s latest, and most incendiary, collision with the
limits of free speech. For years, the program oscillated back and forth between
the cerebral and the coarse, and many listeners, and some participants, chose to
ignore the elements of that dialogue that offended or bored them.
This process came to a head on April 4, 2007, when Imus, and his cohort,
Bernard McGuirk, dismissed the Rutgers University women’s basketball team
as “nappy-headed hos.” This was Imus’s retort to McGuirk’s characterization of
the predominantly African American squad as “some hard-core hos.” Almost
immediately, a torrent of anger ensued, and two days later Imus apologized for