[Marxism] A. Cockburn: Imus and the HeeHaw Racists, Ho Industry Whores

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

Imus and the HeeHaw Racists

Ho Industry Whores

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Like many of the heehaw racists strewn across the cable dial and AM  
frequencies, Don Imus must be wondering why this time he got his  
tongue caught in the wringer. It was suddenly news that Imus shored  
up his ratings with racist cracks at blacks and Hispanics? Only at  
the start of April he went too far by insulting the women athletes of  
Rutgers? Is that when he crossed the Rubicon of racism and the shout  
went up, At long last, have you no sense of decency? It's like  
announcing Bluebeard veered into unforgivable moral excess when he  
knocked off wife number five.

With the full sanction of his employers-primarily CBS and NBC-the man  
was at it for years, along with his sidekicks, Bernard McGuirk and  
Sid Rosenberg and his co-host Charles McCord. Ishmael Reed has a  
brisk resume of choice moments on the Imus Show in a piece in End  
Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, a very fine new book on the  
death of the Fourth Estate, mostly written by Jeffrey St. Clair and  
myself.

"On any day, " Reed wrote, "you might find Bernard McGuirk the man,  
who, according to 60 Minutes, Imus hired to do 'nigger jokes,' doing  
a lame imitation of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, using a plantation- 
type dialect. Blacks, as satirized by McGuirk and others, spend most  
of their time committing malapropisms. McGuirk and co. refer to black  
athletes [are referred to] as "knuckle draggers."

"I replay Don Imus as much as I can," the intrepid Reed wrote,  
"because his putrid racist offerings are said to represent the secret  
thinking of the cognoscenti. Maybe that's why journalists like Jeff  
Greenfield and others admire him so much. He says what they think in  
private." True enough.



Full: http://www.counterpunch.com/

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism