Here are some excerpts from a good article at Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi regarding the kerfluffle with Imus:
The most annoying thing about the Don Imus fiasco? The instant it blew up into an absurdly overdone national controversy, we all knew exactly how everyone was going to play it — or overplay it, as it were.
With very few exceptions almost everyone who jumped onto the Don Imus pigpile was a shameless opportunist whose mind was made up years before this incident even happened.
The idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke. America’s TV networks have spent the last forty years falling over each other trying to find better and more efficient ways to sell tits to the 18-to-35 demographic. They make hour-long prime-time reality dramas these days about shopping-obsessed sluts hitting each other with pocketbooks, for Christ’s sake. Paris Hilton — dumb, rich — gets her own prime-time show. MTV, the teenie mags, the pop music industry, they’re basically all an endless parade of skinny, half-naked brainless women selling makeup and jeans to neurotic, self-hating, weight-obsessed little girls.
The idea that NBC — the company that proudly produced 241 episodes of Baywatch, a show whose two main characters for nearly a decade were Pamela Anderson’s tits — was “offended” by the use of the word “ho” is beyond preposterous.
The race question is even more ridiculous. There’s just no way to talk about the Imus incident without talking about hip-hop and rap culture. Satan himself couldn’t have designed a more effective vehicle for marginalizing black culture than modern hip-hop. In the early days rap music was scary social commentary; it was raw and real and it vividly described a violent street culture that white people didn’t know about and didn’t want to know about. But very quickly rap turned into a multibillion-dollar industry in which the same corporate behemoths who sold us crap like Garth Brooks and boy bands and Britney Spears made massive profits selling a stylized, romanticized version of black misery to white kids in the suburbs.
That was bad enough, but even worse was the way black politicians and black intellectuals so easily bought into the idea that these endless video images of gun-toting, ho-slapping black men with fat wallets, rock-hard tattooed abs and fully-accessorized rides were positive living symbols of “black empowerment” and “black manhood.” Like Tupac was the next Malcolm or something.
As for the people who say there’s no connection between hip-hop and what Imus said, they’re out of their minds. Without Ludacris and 50 Cent and “We Luv Deez Hoez,” Don Imus doesn’t even know what a ho is. The unspoken truth about the Imus story is that there is no difference at all between what Imus does and what Snoop Dogg does. They both get paid to make ethnic slurs. In this case they both use the same one, one stealing from the other. The only difference is that Snoop doesn’t know the joke is on him, too.
