Company News · April 13, 2007

After Imus’ Firing: Instilling A Culture Of Respect

By Edison Research

Maybe the most disheartening thing about the comments that led to Don Imus’ firing yesterday is that for most people who spend any time with Talk radio or edgy high-profile morning shows, those comments weren’t the worst thing they’d ever heard on the radio.
Imus’ comments were inexcusable, but they weren’t unusual. In fact, in the years since the corporate lawyers clamped down on any borderline indecency, race baiting (and gay-baiting) had emerged as the arena where aggressive talent could push the boundaries. Sometimes the comments were overt, but as elsewhere in today’s society, there was more subtle racism, often spoken in code or manifested in a host’s choice of topics (e.g., let’s bemoan corrupt politicians–but mostly the African-American ones).
Only on rare occasions would such content sufficiently provoke somebody outside its intended audience. When actual controversy emerged, owners and General Managers would triage it roughly the way they had any controversy–racially charged or otherwise–since the Greaseman’s Martin Luther King-day remarks in 1986, by responding less to the content of the remarks than to the severity of the backlash. Apology would only give way to a suspension after a few days if the controversy failed to blow over; a firing would only follow if it somehow became clear that a highly-rated or sponsor-friendly personality would no longer be highly-rated or sponsor-friendly.
In the years between the Greaseman’s first offense and his second, an actual firing rarely ever followed. Only in this decade as air personalities ratcheted up the outrage did it become clear that there was indeed such a thing as bad publicity, or that an offending personality might not cross the street immediately to another even better job. And when that happened, some types of manufactured controversy stopped being manufactured. Nobody has butchered a hog in the parking lot since Bubba the Love Sponge. Nobody has sent listeners to have sex in church since Opie & Anthony. And nobody has threatened a rival’s child since Star & Buc Wild. In a different era, other personalities would have rushed to re-create those incidents, or top them.
But even a handful of heavily publicized firings failed to have much effect on racially charged material. Perhaps the corporate lawyers didn’t hand down the same “zero tolerance” guidelines because racially offensive content didn’t have the same ability to jeopardize a license. Clearly, program directors failed to make clear to their talent that race baiting would be dealt with severely at 10:01 a.m., and that it would be an issue not because somebody complained but because it violated a station’s format. And as the Imus incident shows, many of those personalities most likely to cross the line were beyond the purview of a program director anyway.
If anything positive is to come from the Imus controversy in the long run, it is that PDs, GMs, and owners must instill and reinforce a policy of “first do no harm to the audience” and make very clear that they mean to the whole audience, not just those in the target demo. Air talent will always make mistakes, but an ongoing series of deliberate provocations is different from an unfortunate stray remark. And so much recent content has been more insidious because it so often reflects not even a personality’s true beliefs, but a calculated desire for publicity and an inability to get it without choosing to hurt others. If all of that were gone, we would all have a better chance of moving forward together.
My colleague Tom Webster has an additional take on this story here.

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