Shane Life

I’ve watched Don Imus on MSNBC before and I never really found him all that great. He always seemed kind of like an older, more tame version of Howard Stern, in my opinion, but at least he was talking about politics and relevant news rather than always trying to figure out if a girl’s boobs were real.

In a move that surprised no one, CBS fired Imus yesterday shortly after MSNBC had canceled the televised simulcast of his show.

So what now?

There has been a lot of response to the firing of Imus by both CBS and MSNBC and I don’t have a lot to add to it that hasn’t been said, but I wanted to talk about a couple things.

Imus probably should have been fired a long time ago. He’s been much more offensive than this before, but (and I hate to say this), but I blame the media on this firing. Their obsession with the story really fueled much of the debate. I imagine that the apology and a face-to-face with the Rutgers team (not with Al Sharpton), would have been enough. But the media has nothing sensational to talk about now that we know who Anna Nicole’s baby-daddy is. So they dragged the story out (see Anna Nicole’s death, Britney in rehab, Elian Gonzalez, Pacman Jones, etc.) because they don’t have any other good stories (like, say, the war in Iraq, the plummeting housing market, Iran, etc.).

If anything good comes out of this, it will be that perhaps politicos and pundits will be more committed to further examining our long history of racism and sexism, not just by an old semi-shock jock, but by so-called musicians who glorify sex, drugs, murder and other deviant behavior, which was very blatantly pointed out by columnist Michelle Malkin (caution – some language is more than rough). I know that there are those out there that are wanting to ban the “N” word, but why stop there? Keep in mind that we are walking into dangerous first-amendment violations, but if Imus gets fired for this, shouldn’t we start to really think about our use of all words?

Listening to some talk radio, I found that it has some hosts rattled. If someone with Imus’ long track record can get fired, they must be even more careful in the words they choose to use on their own shows. I agree to an extent, but I hope that his firing instead brings a more rational discourse to the nature of our use of language in our culture.