Update II:
Companies including Staples Inc. are pulling their advertisements from Don Imus’ show.
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To follow up on yesterday’s posting of Digby’s remarks on the precipitous chasm between public worry over bloggers’ –with readers in the hundreds– incivility and the public embrace –for decades– of foul, insulting, racist, misogynist ranting from radio and TV hosts –with listeners in the millions– here are just a few of Don Imus’ remarks culled by the SF Chronicle.
Previous slurs by Don Imus
March 16: Imus’ producer Bernard McGuirk, while performing “in character,” refers to Sen. Barack Obama as a “young colored fellah.” He later refers to Hillary Clinton as a “bitch.”
November 2006: Imus calls out his “Jewish management” at CBS Radio as “money-grubbing bastards.”
November 2004: During Yasser Arafat’s funeral, Imus producer Sid Rosenberg calls the Palestinian people “stinking animals” and suggests, “They ought to drop the bomb right there, kill ’em all right now.”
1998: A reporter claims Imus called PBS commentator Gwen Ifill a “cleaning lady,” but Imus later denies he uttered the remark.
Gwen Ifill, [NYT] by the way, thinks Imus said about her what he denies saying.
This is the Dom Imus show leading politicians have scurried to be on for many years. Why has no one given a bleep about his manner?
Update I: John Aravosis at AmericaBlog.org has been doing a little collecting on Imus. You want to see what has been trailing from his lips lo these many years?
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Why is Michael Savage, broadcasting from San Francisco, so lionized?
On the air, he says that Latinos “breed like rabbits”, and that America’s public schools are “teaching kids in the third grade how to put a condom on a cucumber.” He explains that civil rights are a “racket” that is “used to steal only from the white male — no one else pays the price.” He is worried about “degenerates on the left who want to sell Americans on the idea that homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, even sex with animals is normal.” He demonizes pot smokers, refers to third-world nations as “turd world nations”, and strongly opposes abortion (although his first wife had two while they were married). After the Dixie Chicks spoke ill of President George W. Bush, Savage inexplicably suggested they should be jailed as traitors. “We’ve all been warned about the dangers of a theocracy”, says Savage, “where religious zealots rule. Today in America, we have a she-ocracy where a minority of feminist zealots rule the culture.”
Michael Savage – Mr. Civility.
Why is Sean Hannity so bowed to? Why Limbaugh? Why don’t those worried about the state of our discourse go back to say, Newt Gingrich’s infamous paper instructing Republicans to use every scurrilous word they could think of to describe Democrats?
Let’s have a conversation about this but let’s start with the powerful, not the pipsqueaks…