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After Imus, Sights Set on Rap Music

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From the archives: April 14, 2007

See also:
Imus Is Gone, but How About What He Represented?:
An Opportunity to Rethink Strategies
7 Days That Changed the Media World

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Sue Hutchison column, under photo of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, was headlined, “Sexism hurts in any context.”

Some Say News Media Have Ignored Issue

“So,” wrote columnist Sue Hutchison on the front page of Friday’s San Jose Mercury News, “now that we’ve gotten Imus taken care of, can we finally address what’s going on with the misogyny among rappers and their hordes of wannabes?”

Hutchison’s column was one reason the Mercury News gave its centerpiece display to the firing of radio host Don Imus, Managing Editor David Satterfield told Journal-isms. Hutchison’s piece was part of a package of Imus stories out front.

“We publish a paper in a very diverse area. There’s a lot of diversity in Silicon Valley,” Satterfield said. The thinking was that news about “the culture of offense” would resonate with readers. “We’ve got parents with children. It’s one of those stories that is still a talker. It deals with a very human issue,” Satterfield said.

Hutchison echoed what others said during the week, that “the misogyny among rappers and their hordes of wannabes” should be the next issue for those who wanted Imus gone.

The first topic on the e-mail list of the National Association of Black Journalists on Saturday morning was a statement by senior correspondent Juan Williams on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” Friday.

“I think there hasn’t been the kind of lead taken by civil rights leaders to say that rap music is offensive, demeaning, dehumanizing. I think there’s been a real absence there.

“It seems to me that the Al Sharptons, the Jesse Jacksons have allowed that kind of dehumanizing, wrongheaded language to go out in rap music,” Williams continued.

It was a common theme picked up by columnists — about the rap music, that is — and by posters to newspaper message boards — asking where Sharpton and Jackson had been — on the misogyny issue.

Sharpton and Jackson have spoken out against offensive rap music for years. At James Brown’s funeral on Dec. 30, Sharpton recalled that Brown asked him, “What happened that we went from saying, ‘I’m black and I’m proud’ to calling us niggers and ho’s and bitches. I sing people up and now they sing people down. Tell them we need to lift the music up to where children and grandmothers could sit and listen to music together.”

When C. DeLores Tucker, the anti-gangsta rap crusader who founded the National Congress of Black Women, died in 2005, Barry Saunders of the Raleigh News & Observer wrote, “During the 1970s, while he still had a claim to moral leadership, the Rev. Jesse Jackson attacked sexually suggestive songs and urged performers to clean them up. Singers reacted angrily then, too, accusing Jesse of self-promotion at their expense. None of the performers took the reverend’s name in vain the way Tupac Shakur and others did Tucker’s, although that may be because they couldn’t think of an insulting sobriquet to rhyme with ‘Jesse.'”

On the NABJ e-mail list, one member said, “I think the real issue is not whether Jackson and Sharpton have criticized the negative aspects of hip hop culture, but that mainstream media were not particularly receptive to the conversation when it was happening primarily among African Americans.

“Now that large numbers of people — both within and outside the black community — have been galvanized by the Rutgers situation and Imus’s firing — and now that the poised young women on the team have had a national platform to raise the issue — perhaps what already had been a topic of conversation among African Americans will get more coverage.

“Not to put too fine a point on this, but the lack of mainstream media interest in the past when this debate was happening primarily between African Americans (and when the damage was being done to the psyches of young black women) is analogous to black on black crime being considered less important than black on white crime. Now that a relatively powerful white man like Imus is in the crosshairs, more people are paying attention.”

Commentator Roland S. Martin replied, “Rappers are not the culprit, but merely a symptom of a larger problem. Overall, we must focus America on the second-class view of women.”

Ouster was front page in New York Daily News . . .

Jason Whitlock, sports columnist for the Kansas City Star who is also a broadcast presence, caught the attention of some last week when he, too, blamed Sharpton and Jackson. “We all know where the real battleground is,” he wrote. “We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out,” he wrote in the Star on Wednesday.

Sports columnist Neil Best of Newsday suggested that Imus’ show be turned over to Whitlock.

In an Associated Press story on Saturday, Marcus Franklin wrote:

“T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, author of ‘Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women’ and a professor at Vanderbilt University, said many black women resist rap music and hip-hop culture, but their efforts are largely ignored by mainstream media.

“‘It’s only when we interface with a powerful white media personality like Imus that the issue is raised and the question turns to ‘Why aren’t you as vociferous in your critique of hip-hop?’ We have been! You’ve been listening to the music but you haven’t been listening to the protests from us.”

If the battle over Imus does progress into a new awareness of poisonous rap and the record companies that nurture it, hip-hop supporters of the status quo may need to present a better case than they did this week.

“It’s a completely different scenario,” Snoop Dogg said on Tuesday, according to MTV’s Shaheem Reid and Rahman Dukes. He told MTV from his Los Angeles hotel room that rappers “are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about ho’s that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing sh–, that’s trying to get a n—a for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them mutha—-as say we in the same league as him.”
. . . and in Long Island’s Newsday

In the blogosphere, it was reported that Stuart Scott said Wednesday on ESPN Radio’s “Mike & Mike in the Morning Show” that rappers who use the “n-word,” the “b-word,” and “ho” are different from Imus because they’re using it in an affectionate way.

Michael David Smith wrote on the AOL Sports blog the FanHouse that on Friday, hosts Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic invited Scott to return to the show and explain himself.

Scott said on Friday, “I didn’t say that it’s a good thing that these words are used in endearing expressions, and it’s usually, it’s mostly the n-word and the b-word, not so much the h-word. I didn’t say that it’s a good thing, but you can’t disagree that it happens. . . . They are used like that by some people because they are taking a word, as I said, and they are taking the negative, ugly power out of that word, and they are making it something different.”

Russell Simmons and Benjamin Chavis of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network issued this statement on Friday:

“Hip-hop is a worldwide cultural phenomena that transcends race and doesn’t engage in racial slurs. Don Imus’ racially-motivated diatribe toward the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team was in no way connected to hip-hop culture. As Chairman and President of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN), respectively, we are concerned by the false comparisons some in the media are making between Don Imus and hip-hop. We want to clarify what we feel very strongly is an obvious difference between the two.

“HSAN believes in freedom of artistic expression. We also believe, with that freedom, comes responsibility. Don Imus is not a hip-hop artist or a poet. Hip-hop artists rap about what they see, hear and feel around them, their experience of the world. Like the artists throughout history, their messages are a mirror of what is right and wrong with society. Sometimes their observations or the way in which they choose to express their art may be uncomfortable for some to hear, but our job is not to silence or censor that expression. Our job is to be an inclusive voice for the hip-hop community and to help create an environment that encourages the positive growth of hip-hop. Language can be a powerful tool. That is why [one’s] intention, when using the power of language, should be made clear. Comparing Don Imus’ language with hip-hop artists’ poetic expression is misguided and inaccurate and feeds into a mindset that can be a catalyst for unwarranted, rampant censorship.”

Sharpton wrote in 2002 that he responds to such arguments this way: “Well, I don’t know about you, but I use a mirror to correct what’s wrong with me. I don’t look in the mirror to see my hair messed up and my teeth need brushing and just walk out of the house that way. I use the mirror to fix me.”

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Drama Said to Show Internal Clout of Blacks, Women

“What’s different about this firing compared to that of other insult jocks is that people internal to the organizations — women and African-Americans at NBC and CBS — came forward and said, ‘I am in this organization, and I do not want to be associated with this kind of man’,'” Sheri Parks, a University of Maryland professor who teaches courses on race and gender, said in a Baltimore Sun piece headlined, “Dismissal may signal change; Women, blacks instrumental in Imus’ firing.”

“While Imus’ firing could have a dampening effect on shock-jock insults, she said, the lasting lesson for broadcasters is that empowered women and African-Americans were instrumental in prompting his removal,” Nick Madigan and David Zurawik wrote on Saturday, speaking of the firing of radio host Don Imus.

“Parks and other analysts noted that black business leaders played a major role in driving Imus from the airwaves this week: Kenneth Chenault, the chief executive officer of American Express, which pulled its multimillion-dollar account from his MSNBC show; and former NAACP President Bruce S. Gordon, who is a board member for CBS, which fired him Thursday from his radio show.

“Black employees at Sprint Nextel Corp. successfully lobbied CEO Gary D. Forsee to pull the company’s advertising, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“‘For the first time in our history on a media issue like this, we had African-American men and women who were in key positions of power and able to ask, “What is going on here with this kind of vile commentary?,”‘ said Jannette L. Dates, co-editor of the landmark book ‘Split Image: African-Americans in the Mass Media.’

“‘That means that even though there has been this nasty hatefulness in media with comments like the ones from Imus, there has also been progress among this very group of black men and black women that has been treated so vilely,’ she said. “Now, we see some of them in positions of power — with the means to end such hateful talk.”

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Blacks Had Allies in Forcing Imus Out at MSNBC

The downfall of Don Imus at MSNBC was the result of complaints from people of both sexes and all races, NBC diversity chief Paula Madison said on Saturday, although she said a meeting between NBC News President Steve Capus and about 20 African American employees crystallized NBC’s decision that Imus had to go.

Madison’s characterization of the Imus objections as coming from people of all races stood in contrast to the general media portrayal of the controversy as one of white males standing behind Imus and African Americans calling for his removal.

“Journalists of every shade contacted us to let us know this was wrong and the only solution was termination,” Madison said. “There were some pretty significant African Americans placing phone calls who would never think of raising a placard — the kind of people you see in a board room or on a golf course,” Madison told Journal-isms.

“There was NOW, the Billie Jean King sports association, the Links, the National Hispanic Business Association — we heard from a variety of voices,” said Madison, who is president and general manager of KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, NBC Universal executive vice president for diversity and a board member of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

The lesson to be drawn from the experience? “People, especially when something really matters to them, they should speak up.” She added, “one of the things we have to face as a management structure is that employees are reluctant to speak, regardless of race and gender, but especially reluctant to talk about matters of race.

“You can’t just talk about race in a painful situation,” or “when tempers are high and it’s a crisis,” she said.

On Wednesday, after dropping the MSNBC simulcast of the Imus radio show, which originated at CBS-owned WFAN in New York, Capus recapped the events in an interview with David Gregory on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

“I’ve received hundreds, if not thousands of emails, both internal and external, with people with very strong views about what should happen,” Capus said. “I’ve listened to those people with their comments. And many of them are people who have worked at NBC News for decades, people who put their lives on the line covering wars and things like that.

“These comments were deeply hurtful to many, many people.”

The meeting with the African American employees took place Tuesday in a conference room at NBC headquarters in New York, Madison said. She was present, along with Marcia Haynes, executive vice president/sourcing, which means procurement, for NBC Universal. Like Madison, she sits on the network’s Diversity Council.

“What Steve heard was the anger and the frustration and the heartbreak that the African American employees were expressing, and he knew he was going to have to take the action. . . . They made a very compelling series of presentations,” she said. “Everyone spoke who wanted to speak. In many ways it was a dialogue.”

Some were members of the African American Forum at NBC Universal, which includes 1,300 to 1,400 African Americans who work for the company. NBC Universal also has a Hispanic Forum, a GE Women’s Forum, an APAC Forum for Asian Pacific Americans, and Out at NBC, for gays and lesbians. “We have a culture where managers regularly listen to employees who are gathered” in these groups, Madison said.

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CBS Followed “Process” in Making Its Decision

The CBS Radio decision to drop Don Imus came a day later than NBC’s because “MSNBC is a licensee and we’re the employer,” with more at stake in the program, Josie J. Thomas, CBS senior vice president for diversity, told Journal-isms on Saturday.

“The bottom line is that we had very significant meeting on this. Everything is a process,” said Thomas, who noted her bias as a lawyer.

David Bauder of the Associated Press reported Thursday that the Imus program was worth about $15 million in annual revenue to CBS, which owns Imus’ home radio station WFAN-AM and manages Westwood One, the
company that syndicates the show to 61 stations.

The announcement late Thursday that Imus was fired came after a meeting with CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves earlier that day attended by the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson,
National Urban League CEO Marc Morial, Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, a representative of the NAACP, and Thomas. Jackson was the lead person among the visitors, she said. Many news accounts mentioned only Jackson and Sharpton.

Thomas called it a “very productive session” that went beyond the Imus issue to “broader issues of culture and civility, and where we are as a nation.” Thomas said she explained the company’s diversity initiatives.

Unlike at NBC, where diversity chief Paula Madison said people of all races expressed their views, it was the African American employees who raised the Imus issue with her, Thomas said. She said she had no count of the number of complaints or conversations, and said the expressions were made informally. “To CBS’ credit, there is a family there and we talk like family,” she said. “We have open dialogue.”

In CBS’ statement announcing Imus’ firing, Moonves said, “Those who have spoken with us the last few days represent people of goodwill from all segments of our society — all races, economic groups, men and
women alike. In our meetings with concerned groups, there has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision, as have the many emails, phone calls and personal discussions we have had with our colleagues across the CBS Corporation and our many other constituencies.”

“CBS went through a very meaningful process and had a very constructive process and that’s a good thing,” Thomas said.

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Black Journalists’ Role in Firing Noted, Sometimes

The role of black journalists collectively and individually was sometimes acknowledged, sometimes overshadowed by camera-ready civil rights leaders during the week’s Don Imus saga. But some were
determined that the journalists’ role be noted.

“If a group of incensed black journalists and others hadn’t thrust the issue into the mainstream the very next day” after Imus made his on-air remark about “nappy-headed ho’s,” “(well before Al Sharpton hustled to the scene for his close-up), Imus still would be employed today, more than a week after he uttered his nonsense,” Newsday sports columnist Shaun Powell wrote on Friday.

In the Washington Post on Saturday, Colbert I. King wrote, “To shift the argument, as some have done, from Imus to the legitimacy of the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson criticizing Imus, given their own past insensitive remarks, is a smoke screen. The National Association of Black Journalists led the outcry against Imus. We didn’t need Sharpton or Jackson to tell us how we should feel about Imus’s insults or how to recognize what is morally wrong.”

A 2,700-word deconstruction of the events by Brooks Barnes, Emily Steel and Sarah McBride on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal, “Behind the Fall of Imus, A Digital Brush Fire,” described how NABJ President Bryan Monroe became aware of Imus’ offensive statements and alerted members.

On the MSNBC Web site, contributor Miki Turner wrote Friday that she first learned of Imus’ remarks in this column.

At NBC, on-air personality Al Roker and correspondent Ron Allen spoke out strongly, and NBC President Steve Capus cited Roker in explaining why he let the Imus simulcast go. CNN’s newly hired Roland S. Martin was kept busy on several CNN shows.

At newspapers, it was often African American editorial writers who articulated their employers’ position on Imus.

Deborah Simmons, deputy editorial page editor at the Washington Times, wrote a short piece for April 7 and a standard-size editorial, “Imus and Sleaze,” for April 11.

At the Star-Ledger in Newark, Joan Whitlow wrote her paper’s editorial, “Words can cut like an ax,” for Tuesday, and then returned with her own column, “Dumping one shock jock isn’t nearly enough,” which ran Friday.

Lynne Varner at the Seattle Times wrote her paper’s Wednesday editorial, “Airwaves No Place for Imus and His Ilk,” calling for both MSNBC and CBS radio to fire Imus.

“This whole week has proven the need for greater diversity. Between NBC and CBS bosses having no idea the crap Don Imus was spouting to editorial pages having some interesting views on the Duke University case, this has been a week to underscore how poorly race is understood, much less discussed in America,” Varner told Journal-isms with a sigh.

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