Thursday, April 12, 2007

Furor over Imus puts heat on other US broadcasters

Guardian Unlimited

NEW YORK, April 12 (Reuters) - A U.S. cable-television network's decision to drop Don Imus's show has cast a spotlight on other broadcasters who have pushed the bounds of civility, leading to questions of whether they should be tolerated.

Nationally syndicated U.S. radio host Neal Boortz last year said a black congresswoman who has since lost re-election, Cynthia McKinney, "looks like a ghetto slut."

Rush Limbaugh, another national radio broadcaster, in January called Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, whose father was from Kenya and his white mother is from Kansas, a "halfrican American."

And CNN talk-show host Glenn Beck, during an interview with Muslim congressman Keith Ellison, said in November, "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."
Those are some of the examples cited by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday night after his own network canceled the simultaneous broadcast of Imus's radio show because he said a women's basketball team looked like "nappy-headed hos," a phrase widely condemned as racist and sexist.

The comments by Boortz, Limbaugh and Beck were confirmed by the watchdog group Media Matters, which said the same public outcry that forced Imus off MSNBC and forced CBS Corp. to suspend his radio show for two weeks ought to be applied to others.

"It's the media's responsibility to hold these people accountable," said Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Media Matters.

All three men remain in their jobs, and Boortz was among a group of conservative radio hosts who met U.S. President George W. Bush in the White House for 90 minutes last September.

"Every day on talk radio and cable news, journalists, hosts, guests and commentators cross that same line. Regardless of who the victim of that hate speech is, it is damaging and hurtful both to the public debate and the public at large," Frisch said.

Some media experts suggested the examples cited above were not as egregious as Imus's because they targeted public officials rather than collegiate athletes.
But Frisch said politicians did not deserve "racist, homophobic, sexist ridicule."

Paul Levinson, chairman of the Department of Communications and Media Studies at New York's Fordham University, said commentators such as Limbaugh or Ann Coulter were "already identified as crackpots" while Imus was more influential with the mainstream.

Author and columnist Coulter last month called Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards a "faggot," which led three newspapers to drop her column.

"Once someone is identified as beyond the pale, which is how Coulter and Limbaugh are identified, nobody ever takes anything they say all that seriously," Levinson said.
Levinson doubted the Imus incident would spur long-lasting changes.

"If those people began scaling back, they'd lose who they are. They couldn't exist without that level of outrageousness," he said.

Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television, said other commentators would invite similar trouble if they went as far as Imus did.

He did not see a double standard even though Imus is to the left of the political spectrum while those singled out by Media Matters are to the right.

"The rules about who can say what and when are extremely complex," Thompson said. "In Imus's case, it was all about the context."

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