Letters to the Editor
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Just what they wanted
I don't know why conservatives are complaining about the Imus firing - it's a perfect example of market-driven elimination. Imus was fired when the advertisers pulled out. Isn't that what conservatives love? This need to find a liberal conspiracy is pretty far-fetched and obscuring the fact that Imus was fired for what they should think are all the right reasons. When the sponsors stop advertising on Rush's show, he'll be fired, too.
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Oh, woe is them!
For people who claim to believe in rugged, boot-strapping individualism, conservatives sure do spend an awful lot of time whining about how The Man is keeping them down.
This liberal-led purge of conservative talkers is as much a fantasy as the liberal media that they have been howling about for the past 20 years.
Don Imus was fired by two corporate media entities that decided it was more expensive to keep him than it was to get rid of him. Period. It was not until advertisers began to abaondon his TV and radio vehicles that his employers took any real action against him. That initial two-week suspension was a joke.
If the government had shut Imus down over his remarks, I would be the first one on the protest line. That is not what happened. The marketplace that rewarded Imus so handsomely for so many years simply decided to stop doing so. They no longer wanted to buy what he was selling.
What happened to Imus was the free market in action, which is what conservatives say they believe in. Of course, as with so many of the things they claim to believe in, they only believe in it until it threatens to cost them something.
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"Never heard of it . . . until now."
Sometimes those dedicated conservatives are just too diligent for their own good. Rep. Markey's spokesman wasn't familiar with the Fairness Doctrine at all, and Sen. Reid's was barely aware of it and said that it truly wasn't on the majority leader's "radar screen."
Both spokesmen could add, "But thanks for bringing it up."
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Again with Imus?
This has really gotten out of control. More than 2 days on the Imus firing are 2 days too many.
Imus said something stupid and got yanked. There should be a story about why people love to here the same thing over and over and over again for days and days. That would be more relevant than how the Imus thing might expand.
Why do people become addicted to certain stories like O.J. Simpson and the blonde who just O.D.ed in the Bahamas and chose to ignore the massive death in Iraq or the constant lying by their vice president and attorney general?
It just doesn't make any sense to waste your time on someone who nobody listens to anyway.
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But Rush's listeners don't mind at all
The "force" which pushed Imus out of his job has nothing to do with government. He got canned because the networks decided he was going to cost them lost advertising revenue.
Now Rush Limbaugh lost his job as a sports-caster on ESPN when he claimed that Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who is black, owed his celebrity to some kind of "affirmative action." But that's because there are a lot of black sports fans, and they were not obviously going to listen to racist idiocy like that. Since Limbaugh's was chasing off listeners, he was costing the ESPN network a great deal of advertising money. Boom, out of a job, just that quick.
But consider the "ditto-heads" (his term, not mine!) that listen to the Rush Limbaugh talk-radio show! Rush and his "ditto-head" community are one big racist love-in. There's no anti-minority comment he could make to an audience like that, no matter how dishonest or disgusting in nature, which would drive off so many as a tenth of percent of them. They agree with the most malodorous of Limbaugh's innumerable racist cracks. That's what they like best about Limbaugh - that he's a mean racist swine just like them.
So provided he can restrain himself from saying anything blatantly actionable, I think Limbaugh is perfectly safe from the market forces that fell upon Imus last month.
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Nothing to see here, please just move along
This is same old, same old -- just a continuation of the same bogeyman tactic used for YEARS by conservatives. For decades, their mailings have been marked by overheated rhetoric about how the LIBERALS are comin' ta get ya! They want to take your guns, force your pregnant women into involuntary abortions, and mandate that you must allow gay marriage ceremonies IN THE BACKYARD OF YOUR VERY OWN HOME!
The right needs to pump up a scary image in the weak minds of susceptible people, in order to maintain and build support for their own agenda. The left shouldn't fall prey to this by even dignifying this ludicrous spectre of conservatives being forced off the airwaves.
If anyone doubts this bogeyman tactic (who could, really?), a quick visit to the FCC website makes you realize they are STILL fending off the ridiculous assertion that the long-dead Madalyn Murray O'Hair's followers are actively trying to ban religious broadcasters from the air. The right is STILL beating THAT dead horse!
This new "dead horse" is just as dead, but if it works to stir up the yahoos, the right will go for it. Don't give them the satisfaction by falling into their trap.
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I, too, am tired of all the Swede bashing
Kincaid drew a similar distinction in an interview with Salon, saying he favored the FCC's monitoring of broadcasts for sexual indecency, but that he would not support similar measures against racist speech.
"Then you're getting into political speech," Kincaid said, "and what one defines as, quote, 'racism.' How do you define the term? I don't want the FCC to define that."
This is a joke, right? "What one defines as quote, 'racism,' should be pretty self-evident to anyone over the age of six. Does Kincaid really believe that we're better off if the word "tit" is never uttered on the radio, but we'll devolve into anarchy if Rush Limbaugh can't call Halle Berry a "Halfrican American." Really?
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Conservatives are right.
Don Imus was a template for liberals to try to go after conservative talk radio. They could never take down Limbaugh or most of the other major radio host. Mainly because most of them work for radio companies not Mega media companies like Imus. They produce big shares of these radio companies revenues and they will almost never fire them. Plus most of their sponsers are middle size companies. So they will not likely pull advertisements from those shows. Imus was fired more because he work for a mega media company with lot of different sources of income. So they could eat the loss of his show without much pain. Redstone, chair of CBS fired Tom Cruise, or ended their business relationship, because of the thing he said about Brooke Shields and his behavior the last couple of years. So I wasn't surprise by CBS decision to kill the show.