Who'll miss Imus?

The rumble generated from a succinct yet ill-conceived comment that New York (and barely syndicated) morning show host Don Imus made last week somehow leaped the firelines this week and entered the wringing hands of the sports world because a) his target was a group of women basketball players at Rutgers and b) the station he works for is WFAN, the biggest sports-talk station going.
But all this could have easily been doused with one cold bucket of water years ago. Yet, today, we deal with it.
It wasn't Imus' first attempt at strange, twisted, obnoxious piece of humor that simply fell flat. Google searches will turn up all kinds of misdeeds. This time, his dismount from self-inflicted publicity was such an awkward landing that enough people stopped to watch the clean-up crew try some even more ridiculous damage control. Adding Al Sharpton to the circus also does wonders to make what could have been something to take care of on a smaller level suddenly an deal that news organizations love to run with.
Take no small grain of salt about what Imus said. He's perpetuated a stereotype that goes beyond racism. My surprise -- and maybe it shouldn't have been -- is the sexism issue that has been the deeper hurt among females who react to this. To me, it became an issue when the Rutgers team stood together and said it wasn't acceptable. No grandstanding. No screaming and reverse name-calling. Just simple hurt. They didn't have to be a women's basketball team, but to get attention in the sports end of the food chain, it helped.
For the last several days, the issue has been debated back and forth (and back again) on many sports-talk stations, which is at least topical but really isn't a sports topic Should he be fired? He used his right to free speech, and now he's deadling with the backlash. He's helping redefine the demarcation of good taste and respectful humor in today's society, just as Michael Richard did recently. We need an Imus, or a White Sox manager yelling something at a sportswriter, to put his foot in his mouth once and awhile to take our collective temperature on how we would like to deal with these words of hate and stupidity.
I gotta say this suspension that takes place next week -- not immediately -- is proof that his radio bosses are only doing this to try to look responsible and keep him on through a station-sponsored fund-raiser. You either keep him on to face the music indefinitely, based on his track record, or you make him unemployed. It's too valuable, apparently, to do the later, because all he'd do it get hired by another station and take warped listeners away from them. The reaction to this has to be econonically thought out -- boycotting sponsors, specifically, or simply tuning the whole thing out. Thankfully, we don't even have that choice here in Los Angeles.

Here are other blog- and newspaper-generated reactions to this issue that might put things in context:
Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation
Michael Gaynor at The Conservative Voice
Betty Baye of the Louisville Courier-Journal
News updates from Monsters and Critics