The Supercar Registry

Hypocrisy Reigns Over Imus
Pat Boone
Monday, April 23, 2007

Forget carbon emissions.

Forget big gas-burning Hummers, miles of smoke-belching factories, oil
refineries, and steel plants.

We've been looking in the wrong direction for the real cause of the
notorious Greenhouse effect.

The real culprit is the massive amount of hot air, a gigantic tidal
wave of searing, broiling hypocrisy sweeping over our country and being
wafted by the media all over the world.

What caused this eruption, this odious tsunami of gaseous duplicity?

A few spontaneous, ill chosen but would-be humorous words in the early
morning broadcast of the Don Imus show. An off-hand kidding remark
about a college women's basketball game the night before. Bad taste,
sure. But cause for summary judgment and release by MSNBC—and pretty
quickly being fired by CBS, just like that?

Are you kidding me?

Just a minute; what were the ill-chosen words that the early morning
Imus uttered? Aren't they the words ranted and spewed incessantly by
rappers and hip hoppers in their multimillion selling records, the
words that are responsible for the Rollses and Bentleys and Ferraris
and the glittery, opulent "bling" sported obscenely by these "artists"?

The words marketed fervently by the biggest, most profitable record
labels — and rather routinely heard, though garbled and drowned in
raucous noise, on network TV , including CBS? How do you suppose these
words found their way into the vocabulary of Don Imus?

I don't know him personally, but I do know that Don was being paid by
CBS and MSNBC to be grumpy, irascible, irreverent, and highly
opinionated, every day to delicious ratings, for around 10 million
dollars a year.

That's his public persona, the reason people tuned in to hear and
enjoy his show. His popularity and on-air spontaneity drew a lot of big
guests, politicians and newsmakers and business moguls, celebrities of
every stripe, to benefit from the exposure to his audience and possibly
gain a grudging compliment or two.

Meanwhile, across town at Sirius Radio, Howard Stern is being buried
under an avalanche of money, over a half billion dollars, to say far
more reprehensible, morally inexcusable things every day, to a
predominately high school and college-age crowd! He calls himself "the
king of all media," and his salary would certainly seem to make him the
logical poster boy of modern media and entertainment today.

And guess what? The man who is running Sirius and making Stern the
sultan of sleaze is the very man who championed him when he was running
CBS for Viacom, the parent company of that network. And guess what,
again? Viacom has bragged recently that another of its subsidiaries,
MTV, is its most profitable entity, carried in 160 countries and making
sure that all those millions of viewers around the world hear the words
that got Imus fired. Fired by CBS!

Compared to Howard Stern and a growing number of other highly paid
"shock jocks," Don Imus is a kindly old father confessor, reminiscent
of the neighborhood barber who seems a little grumpy, who voices his
complaints to any who will listen, but you know he has a kind heart and
only means half of what he says.

So the rappers and record execs roll in filthy lucre, the networks
rake in ratings and moolah from shows that portray every form of
immorality and violence, the cable webs glorify decadence, profanity,
and every last taboo, the weekly magazines and news networks belabor
the Imus incident as if it were World War III, hoping to score ratings
and sales.

Instantly, two of the foremost minor prophets of our day, Jesse
Jackson and Al Sharpton, are all over television condemning Imus' six
or seven words and demanding he be fired, if not deported, by week's
end.

Having apparently been away for several years, maybe on some other
planet, and unaware of Snoop Dog and Ludacris and Fifty Cent and Nelly
and countless other rappers who've been inundating the sensibilities of
America's young with the very words Imus uttered — plus every other
foul obscenity known to man — set to music and MTV videos for the world
to enjoy, the two modern Jeremiahs also seem to have forgotten highly
public missteps and misstatements each have made themselves.

The public hasn't forgotten, but who cares?

Our beloved Oprah recently gushed praise on Russell Simmons for his
philanthropic activities, good as they are, ignoring how he came by his
millions — creating Def Jam records and TV's filthiest show ever, Def
Comedy Jam, featuring mainly black men and women quite simply competing
with each other for the Toilet Mouth of the Month award.

After all, our venerable Motion Picture Academy declared, just two
years ago, that the very best song all our best movie composers and
producers could come up with — all year long, and out of all our
creative genius, was "Hard out Here for a Pimp." And if I went
un-edited with the lyrics of that masterpiece here, I'd get fired, at
least from NewsMax!

A paean to pimps, prostitutes — yes "hos" — and the whole seedy world
of decadent street life, this song joins "White Christmas," "Over the
Rainbow," and "Mona Lisa" as an Oscar winner — America's best! Is there
a more definitive way of being ratified mainstream? And Imus got fired.

Which, on a scale of 1 to 10, would you say was worse? Imus' dumb
slight of some college girls who didn't even know he existed? Or Rosie
O'Donnell's scandalous claim that "the Christian right is as bad as the
Taliban" in America?

She only slandered, vilified, and insulted 60 or 70 million fellow
Americans, who do know she exists; but what kind of media firestorm did
that kick up?

You guessed it.

Little or none. The ratings of "The View" went up, and she virtually
took over the show.

To her credit, she had little to say about the Imus affair, when the
subject came up, though. I'm guessing she didn't want her audience to
start thinking about what was appropriate to say on the air, and what
wasn't.

Yes, ice is melting, the barriers are disappearing, the moral
guidelines are vanishing — and the hypocrisy is becoming acutely
noxious. Some pots are calling some kettles black . . . so insistently,
so loudly, that the public airwaves are getting toxic.

It's every man for himself, every woman for herself; and the rules, if
any, keep changing. Courtesy? Respect? For who? For what?

Almost nightly, the talk-show hosts revile the president, even the
Pope, with rude and salacious jokes — all just for laughs, of course.
And millions of dollars.

Nothing sacred, nobody "off limits," freedom of expression, "free
speech," and all that. Who really cares if somebody is hurt or
insulted? It's just a joke, right? Imagine what poor Don Ho felt,
hearing his name everywhere drug through the muck like that. Come on,
get real, bring Don Imus back . . . or maybe replace him with kindly
old Don Rickles.