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Copyright by John T. Reed

I listened to Don Imus‘s radio show in the early 1970s when I was an Army officer stationed at Fort Monmouth, NJ. I assume he was doing his towel-snapping, gratuitous insults routine back then but I don’t specifically recall it. I liked the parodies he did.

For example, the fictional “Right Reverend Billy Sol Hargis, pastor of the First Church of the Gooey Death and Discount House of Worship in Del Rio, TX where this week and this week OWNly, Yeeoo can make a five-dollar donation for just $2.98, but you get credit with HEEIM for the full five dollars. Say Hallelujah.”

That’s funny.

It’s also liberal. Conservatives are not fond of making fun of evangelical Christians.

I listened again a few years back because he had all sorts of C-span type discussions with top experts and writers. I had not been listening in recent years.

I am not surprised he was fired for making some gratuitous insult with a racial tint to it. But I don’t understand why he was fired now for that. Since he’s been doing that for almost 40 years, the stated reason cannot possibly be the real reason.

Getting prominent people fired has become a sport

Judge Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court. He was eminently qualified, but Democrats stopped his nomination by simply throwing a hissy fit over nothing. (I am a Libertarian, not a Republican.) Bork’s name became the verb for this sort of thing. No one remembers what the Democrats complaint about Bork was. Just that they got him.

They tried to Bork Clarence Thomas and almost succeeded. He has done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.

Former Senator John Tower was nominated for Secretary of Defense. The Democrats and media started saying over and over that he was a “womanizer.” He protested that he was a single man during the period being cited as evidence and demanded to know what, exactly a “womanizer” was. He never got an answer. He also was successfully Borked and did not get confirmed.

Recently, his enemies got Donald Rumsfeld to resign after a long campaign against him. True, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not gone well, but the blame for that belongs to George W. Bush, the generals in command, to an extent to the politicians in Washington, to an extent to the Iraqi politicians, to an extent to the Syrians and Iranians. Rumsfeld deserves some of the blame, but he was just one of a number of important players in the drama. I don’t think his decision making and recommendations were perfect, but no one else’s were either.

It appears that Rumsfeld was singled out to be fired because the “athletes” of the get-someone-prominent-fired sport detected a weakness in his sometimes imperious demeanor.

The mindlessness of this sport can be seen in a couple of aspects. The organization that did this to Imus was Media Matters, a liberal group. Imus is a liberal. He is politically incorrect, but otherwise a liberal. They were not even recording his show to get him but rather in the hopes of getting one of his conservative guests.

Nonetheless, when the 26-year-old guy who was in charge of looking for gotchas in the Imus show heard the Rutgers remark, Media matters threw the same kind of hissy fit they daily throw about various conservative hosts whom they also monitor. Obviously, they were more interested in getting someone, anyone, fired, so they could beat their chest in celebration of their own power, than they were in advancing their liberal agenda. They were successful in starting the media fire that consumed Imus—for the moment anyway. I expect he will soon be back in an organization with fewer timid empty suits running it than CBS and MSNBC.

Volleyball coaching

I had a tiny similar experience once. I was coaching football at a high school. They needed a boys volleyball coach. I mentioned, to my regret, that I had played that sport for many years. They asked me to coach. I protested that I had never done so and was not interested. But as the months wore on, no other applicant appeared. If I did not help out the athletic director, who was also my boss and head varsity football coach, he would have to cancel the volleyball program for the season.

At the parent-player meeting, I told them I had no experience and had not wanted the job but that no one else wanted it either so I hoped they would accept my efforts in the spirit and context in which they were offered. I also explained all the efforts I was making to get up to speed: meeting with top coaches, studying books on coaching the sport, observing the practices of our school’s undefeated girls volleyball team, and so forth. I asked the players to help me by making suggestions on our practices.

Big mistake. I showed weakness by being truthful about my lack of volleyball coaching experience.

I later threw two guys off the team for discipline reasons. One, apparently thought he was going to run the team. He had friends on the team. They started a campaign to get me fired. I calmly repeated that no one else had applied for the job and that any applicants during the season were even less likely and that firing me or any other coach in that situation would mean the school would have to end the program instantly. There has to be an adult coach and there was no other.

It did not matter to the terminated player, his mom, and his buddies. Other players begged me to stay which I did mainly because I had promised my boss that I would coach the team for the season. At that point, I would have loved to have been fired.

The team finished second in the league, the highest finish in school history, mainly because of two German exchange students. The players who had begged me to stay begged me to come back the next season. “No way,” I told them.

The main point of the story was that the kids who wanted me fired loved volleyball and played it on club teams in the off-season. Firing me would have left them without an adult coach, thereby ending their season in the middle of it, or with some substitute teacher type of adult “coach” who never even played the sport and who certainly would not have been a coaching improvement over me. But the blood-in-the-water firing frenzy overcame all rationality among the player’s friends and his mom.

Imus will be back

I expect that fired shock jocks will gravitate to some sort of new media where they can reap the multimillion-dollar benefit of the advertising revenue they have long commanded without having to share it with the empty suits. Michael Savage was fired for some anti-gay slur a few years back. He is now the number three radio personality in the nation with a different network.

No one defends what Imus said, not even Imus himself. Hardly anyone, including me, is interested in defending his general shtik of gratuitous ethnic insults either. But there’s no accounting for taste. Millions want to listen to these guys and will as soon as the empty suits are taken out of the equation. With the Internet, that is exactly what’s happening. Media Matters is a creation of the Internet.

$25 million in ad revenue

CBS and MSNBC will lose approximately $25 million of ad revenue for firing Imus. His was one of the top audience-size radio programs in the country and the top-rated program on CBS radio. His program had the highest ratings of any program on many of the affiliates who paid CBS to carry it. The empty suits who caved into those who wanted him fired will very likely find themselves fired for their inability to replace the $25 million and the corporate losses that follow from the inability to find an adequate replacement.

Both organizations said that they fired Imus in part because of requests from their employees to do so. I suspect that a number of those employees will find that they fired themselves when the loss of the $25 million in ad revenue causes cut-backs.

The old saying can be reversed. Die by the Internet. Live by the Internet. Media Matters may have accomplished nothing but moving Imus over to their medium. In the long run, the only ones they may have gotten fired are some of the corporate executives who are inclined to kow tow to them.

John T. Reed