John, I plead guilty, but only when I was originally in college, and at an all-male school, so it was pretty bad. This really is all about money. If ratings were slipping the guy would be gone, not suspended. If he can generate money, they are going to keep him. The rules don’t have enough power to really make them important. If there were real costs associated with this, it would stop. But the bottom line is that most of the US has never heard or heard of Don Imus and this is a “media” story, not a real story. This was a New York story put on the national stage because it was a cheap way to fill airtime.

Karen, given their numbers, it would be hard to find people who do listen.

🙂

Talk radio was never considered to be good or even acceptable radio, just dirt cheap to produce. No need to pay hefty annual ASCAP or BMI licenses to play music. Just a microphone, a telephone, and some nitwit who will work for peanuts to hear himself jibber-jabber. Idiot callers supply the story line.

The untold story is how many of those callers are home-bound due to serious mental as well as physical disabilities. Most of them are completely nuts, drunk, high, or terminally stupid — and the talk show producers know it.

I should know. I used to be a weekend talk show host years and years ago on a major clear channel station elsewhere in the nation. It wasn’t my main job, just a sideline, but very soon I learned to despise it. I felt committed for the two years I had promised, though. Without exception, all the full time talk show hosts at that 24-hour talk-and-sports radio station felt the same as I did, but they needed the money, lousy at it was, and couldn’t quit.

For what it’s worth, that experience tells me the acerbic personality of Imus (and Limbaugh and etc. etc.) that some people find so amusing is born of self-loathing. At some level of the conscious or unconscious, no matter how much they are paid these guys know better than anyone that they have sold their souls.

Donnen?

Apple’s next product, the iMus: it no longer has the hard drive it used to have, and has a capacity of only one really offensive song, but it plays it over and over for years. There are no preorders for this product, but delivery may be delayed two weeks anyway, or possibly indefinitely. The price to you, the consumer: all hope of self-respect in the future. Disrecommended; two thumbs in… I mean, two thumbs down.