From the perspective of the media tent, there emerged a true
star out of this summer’s debt-deal crisis. And no, it wasn’t Paul
Ryan. For us, rather, it was craggy-faced old Don Imus, who gave
Neil Cavuto the perfect interview for
News Alert on July 30 — one that gleefully pushed the
debt-ceiling debate from Continental Congress-like July into the
dog days of D.C. August.
Cavuto treated him like America’s dirty uncle, and Imus played
along perfectly. “This is nonsense! It’s a television show!” he
ranted of the Capitol Hill proceedings. And when asked if he
thought the credit-downgrade was imminent, he made a false
prediction that seemed perfectly sensible: “I don’t think they’re
going to do it to us. It’s not in the spirit of doing
business.”
Imus in the Morning remains the last great example of
the metropolitan American art form of morning radio. It’s
old-school New York media culture in caricature, with “Cardinal
Egan over from the Archdiocese” to read lottery numbers. Imus makes
high, bitter comedy out of the tropes of Old Broadcasting. And he
does it when city people of all ethnicities are bumping into each
other at their most off-the-record: during the morning commute.
Unless he’s away “on the ranch,” he does his show from the Fox
Business Network studios in Rockefeller Center: his home since
signing a simulcast deal with FBN in September 2009. On the heels
of his “nappy-headed hos” comment and ouster from MSNBC,
Imus-to-Fox seemed like one of those Roger Ailes hirings borne of
political indignation (like Fox News’ later embrace of Juan
Williams after he was canned by NPR). The ratings reflect that.
While Imus in the Morning remains one of the ten
highest-rated programs in New York morning radio with a 3.5 share
(justifying to some degree the $8 million a year Imus currently
makes from WABC), his television ratings are sub-test signal. He
averaged 65,000 viewers on Fox Business in the first quarter of
2011 (down 45 percent from the same period in 2010, and down from a
competitive 361,000 viewers when he was on MSNBC in 2007). From a
television perspective, Imus isn’t worth his own Rockefeller Center
studio, and his show isn’t exactly a venue for guests to reach a
mass audience.
So there’s something else still bringing senators and
bestselling authors to Imus’ daily boys’ club. Something else that
makes his show a hotspot for snide male political commentators like
Bill Maher and Matt Taibbi. And it might just be that Imus in
the Morning, in the absence of ratings, is the most honest
depiction of political discourse in all of media.
While cable news trots out young model-anchors and
actor-pundits, Imus reminds us that politics is still a game played
by cursing old men over cocktails. And he makes them seem like
regular guys. Where else can you hear Paul Begala get called a
“numbnuts”
or someone like Joe Lieberman
say, “May all your sabbaths be peaceful” with a coarse, genuine
chuckle? Even after all his P.C. trouble, Imus’ notable guests
didn’t abandon him. That wouldn’t be in the spirit of doing
business.
For the past two years, Imus, 71, has been battling stage 2
prostate cancer. Though September
marks Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, Imus will stay
tight-lipped on the issue. He hasn’t spoken publicly on his
condition in over a year — funny, considering that his on-air
staff used to give him such a hard time for talking about it (“Do
you think anyone cares about your urinary tract defects?”
mustachioed newsreader Charles McCord yelled at him during their
Fox Business launch. “You’ve killed sympathy for yourself!”) But
the prolonged silence, coupled with the I-Man’s age and his younger
brother Fred’s death on August 10, gives us grim thoughts.
On August 14, former WNBC New York executive vice president and
Imus mentor Bob Sherman
died of cancer himself. When Sherman joined WNBC in 1979 his
first move was to re-hire Imus — then a New York radio expat
serving his exile in Cleveland. With Sherman’s blessing, Imus
carved out a style all his own, mocking political America with
over-the-top characters like evangelist “Rev. Billy Sol Hargus” and
a recurring Jesse Jackson impersonator. Imus understood just how
middlebrow the political game seems to the average
American, and he talked about it accordingly. Even as his profile
expanded with national syndication and an off-color Clinton-era
Correspondents’ Dinner performance, Imus never lost his smirking
nihilism. When Charlie Rose congratulated him in 1997 for
making a Time shortlist of the most influential people in
America, Imus joked that somebody at Time must have a book
coming out that they want to promote on his show.
Today, Imus’ name is inextricable from the 2007 racial
controversy he incited. Author Sophia A. Nelson is currently
touring the country with her book Black Woman Redefined,
which she claims
was inspired by an “open season on accomplished black women” that
reached a tipping point with the I-Man’s crude joke about Rutgers
women’s basketball players. As recently as August 15,
Huffington Post speech-policer Max Perry Mueller
called for some negligible little Cal Thomas quote in USA
Today to “move fingers to keyboards to type messages of
repudiation for (Thomas’) Don Imus-like racial slur.” A group of
black women has
created a Facebook sorority, seemingly in direct belated
response to Imus, with the aim of turning the word “nappy” into
“happy” and to “educate, inspire, and uplift” by…
Imus doesn’t care. Unlike fellow cancerous rogue Christopher
Hitchens, Imus is too gruff and formally uneducated to win media
redemption in his final years. My only hope is that a young cult
audience will tune in to him now and witness an urban American
collective unconscious tapped into…before it’s too late.
“The only people following this are sitting at home wearing
their ‘Pinheads and Patriots’ T-shirts, mouthbreathers, eating up
macaroni in the microwave and waiting for you to tell them
what’s going on!” Imus yelled at Cavuto during the debt debacle.
Though forced to keep the old man at arm’s length for the sake of
his own reputation, Cavuto nonetheless couldn’t stifle a laugh.
Ratings or respect aside, even the suits at Fox know deep down that
there’s no accounting for style.
