Personally, I have almost never listened to Don Imus. The tiny bit of exposure I've had to the guy formed a general perception of a rather rude and arrogant wierd sort of cowboy type.
But I think the reaction to his racist/sexist comment about the ladies basketball team was way over the top. Even though the comment was stupid, I don't know the context in which he said it. Whatever he said, he shouldn't have said it, but he shouldn't have been fired for it.
If Imus should be fired and banished from the air for that single, admittedly offensive phrase, then lots of others should also immediately be taken off the air. Why pick and choose who can be offended and who cannot? If we will not tolerate offensive speech for one group, then we should not tolerate offensive speech for any group.
Given the standard applied to Imus, here are others that should be fired and taken off the air immediately:
1. Bill Maher, for publicly wishing somebody would assasinate Dick Cheney.
2. All the Air America talkers for calling Bush a Fascist, Clarence Thomas Uncle Tom, Condoleeza Rice Aunt Jemima, and on and on.
3. All the reporters and columnists at the AP, Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times, and so on, for the same types of statements in #2.
While we're on the topic of offensive language, then let's extend it to language that offends me. Anyone who says any of the following within my hearing should lose their job and publicly excoriated:
1. Atheists calling Christians weak-minded, ignorant, bigoted and stupid.
2. Blacks calling white people "Crackers".
3. Anybody else using various racial and ethnic slurs like "wop", "polack", "chink", "nigger", "kraut", "raghead", "wetback". In a joke, referring to their own race, whatever. Fired immediately and publicly humiliated, regardless of where or to whom they made the slur.
4. Anybody who ever again calls somebody a "neocon". I'm so sick of that word, that really doesn't mean anything except "evil republican".
5. All obscenities, profanities and vulgarities. Such language is used only for shock value by those without the vocabulary to express themselves effectively.
Should we make the police arrest people for what they say, when somebody might be offended by it? Don't say anything that anybody might find offensive, even if you didn't know it would be offensive to anybody, or you could be fired, arrested, and find yourself excoriated on 24-hour cable news channels.
Does no one else see the insanity here?
1 comment:
1.) I think you should be fired if your employer loses money due to something you said. Everyone in your first list is safe - they make money for their employers by the judicious application of hate speech. They will never be fired for it.
2.) I don't think the use of hate speech in and of itself is grounds for any sort of punishment. Free speech should mean something, not just "free unless someone else has their feelings hurt".
3.) Atheists will call Christians weak-minded as long as there are few truly intelligent Christian thinkers who can defend their viewpoints without resorting to "because God said so" (read "faith). They'll still probably say it after that, to be honest, but at least no one will listen anymore.
4.) Hate speech by blacks against whites is meaningless - sometimes people need an outlet for anger that they don't completely understand, and being angry at a race is an easy outlet. It sometimes leads to genocide, of course, but treating it like a serious threat all the time is a waste of energy.
5.) Of course profanity is used for thoughtless expression. It's easy. Profanity represents, in a way, a return to the nuanced, small-vocabulary speech of more primitive languages, using expression, intonation, and emphasis to create meaning using a small subset of words.
Okay, I'm done.
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