Asshole radio

By Michael J.W. Stickings

And the Imus racist-sexist insult story goes on and on and on, the media turning it into something far more significant than it really is -- for example, the headline on Anderson Cooper this evening: IMUS OUTRAGE.

Honestly, big fucking deal.

I don't care for Don Imus -- I never have -- and what he said about the Rutgers women's basketball team was quite clearly racist and sexist. And I understand that the players were hurt by it.

But is anyone truly surprised by this? Is anyone sincerely outraged? This is Imus we're talking about. And talk radio. Imus is hardly the only radio host who has used racist and sexist language. And he is hardly the worst. Indeed, popular right-wing blowhards like Limbaugh and Hannity are far more offensive far more frequently than Imus ever has been.

Imus has been suspended for two weeks, and perhaps that was the right punishment for CBS and MSNBC to mete out -- it's up to them. But calls for further censorship concern me for the very same reasons they concern Capt. Fogg, who wrote about this whole stupidity earlier yesterday. Racist and sexist speech of this kind is certainly offensive, but freedom, including the freedom to be offensive, should take priority, given its foundational place in liberal democracy, over attempts, mostly ill-founded, to limit it for the sake of trying to protect people's feelings or otherwise to sanitize society to the point where there is no genuine diversity of thought and speech at all.

This is not to defend Imus, of course, nor to suggest that the Rutgers players are in the wrong to be upset by what he said. He offended them, and they have every right to speak out against him. On that, I'm with them. But let's not take this too far. Unlike media outlets -- pretty much all the major ones -- desperate to fill the 24/7 "news" cycle with fabricated sensationalism, let's not make it out to be more than it is. A stupid man said a stupid thing, and he has continued to say stupid things in his defence, in his lame efforts at contrition. That's pretty much it.

Indeed, all that we have learned from this episode -- as if we needed the reminder -- is that Don Imus is an ignoramus with a foul mouth.