Bigotry's cheerful enablers

IT'S STILL uncertain when or where shock-jock Don Imus will return to the airwaves, now that he has settled his suit with CBS. But a more interesting question is this: When Imus does come back, will distinguished American media personages such as Frank Rich, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Tom Brokaw continue to show up on his show, lending him respectability and cover for his racist, misogynistic, and gay-baiting rants?

The willingness of apparently decent people, some of them liberal icons, to serve as Imus's cheerful enablers has been one of the more depressing features of the media landscape over the past decade. Tim Russert, Howard Kurtz, Jeff Greenfield, and James Carville all tut-tutted over the "nappy-headed ho's" remark about the Rutgers women's basketball team that got Imus fired last spring. But not one of these people had ever challenged Imus's long history of making or encouraging similar slurs against blacks, women, and gays. African-American journalist Clarence Page did once ask Imus on the air to cut that stuff out. Page was never asked back on the program.

Imus was usually careful not to rail against "fags" and "towel heads" and "our urine-colored brothers" in the middle of an interview with, say, author Goodwin. Most of the hate speech was saved for before and after chats with Goodwin, Tom Oliphant, or Maureen Dowd. On those rare occasions when Imus lost it and spouted some foul epithet or accusation during an interview, more often than not some mild tsk-tsking ensued, or just an awkward silence. Nobody ever had the guts to say to him, "I-Man, you're a mean, ignorant, infantile old fool. When are you going to grow up?"

And this went on for years. The writer Philip Nobile has kept a running record of Imus's bigoted venom. In 1999, when his sidekick news reader Charles McCord reported the indictment of two white state troopers for the attempted murder of two young black athletes on the New Jersey Turnpike, Imus had advice for the athletes: "Eenie-meenie-minie-mo. Get over it."

Imus and his producer, Bernard McGuirk, regularly used epithets like "brillohead," "dark meat," and "knuckle-draggers." Women Imus didn't like were "ugly ho's." (His own attractive wife, Deidre, was merely a "ho" and a "moron.") Lesbians were "that big old lesbo" and far worse. Gays were "fags" and "homos" and "queers." A running gag for a time involved Abner Louima, the New York City man savagely sodomized with a broomstick by two cops, who were convicted of the attack. This was an occasion for many yuks among the I-Man and his friends.

So, as Imus himself might ask, what's the deal here? Why did people who presumably do not hold such irrationally contemptuous views of entire groups of Americans appear on his show, and why did lots of nonbigoted people listen to Imus?

The people I know who like Imus say they listened to him selectively. They simply cringed and disregarded the ugliness. They liked his extended, informal interviews with and about newsmakers. They liked his boldness, too, in pointing out the deadly looniness of Bush administration antiterrorism policy, especially in Iraq. One friend said Imus was simply more fun in the morning than NPR was. An editor I know praised Imus for standing up to "political correctness." Though objecting to, say, Abner Louima jokes hardly seems like PC-ism run amok. I'd call it sanity.

The media elite who went on Imus likely had pecuniary reasons for reaching his sizable audience -- flogging their books or their own brand names -- but they seemed to enjoy themselves, too. In a thoughtful online anti-Imus screed, the African-American writer Ishmael Reed quotes Washington Post and CNN media critic Howard Kurtz in his 1995 book "Hot Air." Kurtz maintained that Imus's routines were what many journalists joked about in private and "some of us relish his naughtiness."

I'd hate to think that's so. At NBC, does Tom Brokaw sneer at "that fag" after a gay newsman or woman leaves the room? Does Doris Kearns Goodwin call the black men she knows "dingos"? Would Howard Kurtz refer to a non-Caucasian as a "gook" or "zipperhead"? I hope not. But given the unwillingness of all these fine folks to call Imus and his crew on any of this mean and stupid garbage, how are we to know? Imus is expected to return to the airwaves in the fall, and we'll find out then how many of his old media cronies will resume their pastimes as bigotry's enablers.

Richard Lipez writes the Don Strachey gay private eye novels under the name Richard Stevenson.