Don Imus To Add Extra Echo To Fox’s Chamber

Newsnight’s all well and good with its even-handed approach, but sometimes you want something different from your news analysis show, like incendiary personal opinions backed up by nothing but the presenter’s cacophonous internal monologue.

The UK media landscape having been sculpted by the caring hand of first Reith and now Ofcom, one-sided political ranting outside of clearly demarcated zones of madness like Question Time and Jeremy Kyle is against the law, which is good for our populace as it means people can’t get sucked into a news/opinion feedback loop that reinforces and strengthens their political views until they’re warped, extreme and written on a placard. No such legislation in the US though, which is bad for the aforementioned placard-wavers, but great if you’re a Brit who wants to get your mind boggled by what people actually get away with saying.

Specifically: Fox. And Fox’s brand of soft news, with the bothersome and dull business of fact transmission smeared with the crazy that comes from its presenters’ brains. Fox and Friends is one such show, mocked on a weekly basis by Gawker, which would be lazy blogging were every episode not so worthy of derision. At least that show has three people to bat the madness around – others, like the soapboxes created for Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, are monolithic opinion edifices, like a tabloid column made manifest in mid-priced suits, scornful glances, and that editing that American TV uses where the screen flashes white with every cut.

Now the latest to join the Fox stable could be Don Imus, the shock jock famously fired by CBS for making racist comments. He referred to a black female basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s” and “jigaboos”; when talking about a suspended football player, he asked “what colour is he?”, and when he realised he was black, he replied “Well, there you go”. He also has a rather progressive attitude to the word “nigger”, apparently peppering his speech with it when off-air. We all know that Glenn Beck doesn’t like racists at all, recently branding Obama one, saying that he had “a deep seated hatred of white people, of white culture”, but hopefully he and Imus will get along.

Imus doesn’t have kneejerk reactions against just black people – the Jews haven’t fared much better. Check this video, in which he first displays a pragmatic approach to the mechanics of political correctness (on the Blind Boys of Alabama: “they’re handicapped, they’re black and they’re blind, what more do you want?”) before going on to attack the Jewish heads of CBS for being “money-grabbing bastards”. He also said Howard Stern should be “castrated” and “put in an oven”.

Still, he does look after kids with cancer, and is suffering from prostate cancer himself. Maybe the experience will mellow him somewhat, but then he is going to Fox, whose atmosphere doesn’t exactly discourage firebrands. Expect Imus, Beck and Hannity to imperceptibly spur each other on to greater moments of inappropriateness until Glenn is wearing a white hood on air and we haven’t really noticed.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | August 17, 2009 1:52PM |