All right, one more interruption. I had really meant to go back to my dull and comfortable ramblings about The Magic Flute, but since everyone in the United States is required by Act of Congress to have an opinion on the Don Imus scandal, here’s mine.
What Mr. Imus said was disgusting, vicious, and inexcusable.
But that was what you hired him for, wasn’t it? Yes, you, over there at CBS, I’m talking to you. You paid Don Imus big money precisely because you knew he was going to say disgusting, vicious, and inexcusable things every day.
Now you’re firing him for one of them.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not lobbying to get Imus back on the air. (Nevertheless, he’ll be back, with legions of devoted followers, who don’t care how smart or well-informed he is as long as he continues to act like a seventh-grade class clown.) But don’t you think someone is being a little hypocritical? Yes, I’m looking straight at you, CBS, right in your big eyeball. Shouldn’t you be firing the executive who decided it would be a good idea to fill the air with juvenile offenses to good taste?
But that’s the way the business works, isn’t it? It’s the way it’s gone with every “shock jock” on the air. You pay them for the insults and the junior-high-school bullying, and they come through with it day after day, and you rake in the millions in advertising. Then finally one of the victims makes enough of a stink that the sponsors start to flinch. Then you fire the on-air personality, declaring that you have high standards, and—what do you know?—you’ve still got all those millions you made from all his previous offenses.
If you’re the “talent,” as I believe they call it in the business, it’s just playing Russian roulette with your career. You know you have to keep saying offensive things, and you know that eventually one of them is going to kill you. Anyone who agrees to a deal like that has probably already signed a contract with a more ruthless master than CBS.
So here’s my advice for Mr. Imus when he makes his big comeback on a different network: use bigger words—you know, words that take more than two letters to spell. Did you notice, for example, how I just called you Satan’s tool, but nobody even flinched? That’s because I used bigger words than “tool,” and I used a good number of them.
