By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
CBS Radio has fired Don Imus. That’s perhaps a bit more than necessary (not that I’m shedding any tears), but, according to the Associated Press, advertisers were abandoning him and his high-profile media buddies were jumping ship.
New England Cable News is supposed to be dropping by Media Nation for an interview in a little while.
Update: You can watch the NECN piece here.
Mike, how can we miss you if you won’t go away?
Yesterday, Herald columnist Howie Carr wrote that former Globe columnist and current Herald contributor Mike Barnicle — identified only as “a local columnist … who … had just been forced to quit his paper for writing ‘fables'” — had once conveyed an insult to Don Imus that Carr claims he’d never uttered. That allegedly provoked an outburst by Imus against Carr’s wife that Carr claims led to an out-of-court settlement.
Today, Globe columnist Joan Vennochi alludes to Barnicle — or maybe it’s Doris Kearns Goodwin (or both) — in writing about why Imus’ well-connected friends are sticking by him following his “nappy-headed hos” characterization of the Rutgers women’s basketball team: “No one wants to give up the air time or book plugs, no matter what Imus says on the air. He forgives them their transgressions, be it plagiarism or drunken moments caught on tape, and they forgive him his.”
Just to be clear, Barnicle’s transgression was plagiarism, not drunkenness.
Meanwhile, the Herald’s Jesse Noyes and Jessica Heslam report today that Imus doesn’t have to worry about being Wally Pipp to someone else’s Lou Gehrig during his two-week suspension: He’ll be replaced by, yes, Mike Barnicle. Noyes and Heslam helpfully note that Barnicle himself once called former secretary of defense Bill Cohen, who’s white, “Mandingo” — a charming reference to the fact that Cohen’s wife, Janet Langhart, is black.
Finally, the siege continues. As you no doubt already know, MSNBC pulled the plug on Imus yesterday. Will he be able to keep his CBS Radio show? We’ll find out soon enough.
Stop what you’re doing right now and read Howie Carr’s Herald column on Don Imus, starring Mike Barnicle (unnamed, but he’s hard to miss), Alan Dershowitz, Riddick Bowe and an unspeakably sick putdown of Carr’s wife that Howie attributes to the I-Man. No direct evidence that Imus ever said it, but Carr claims Imus settled out of court, and I believe him.
Meanwhile, Imus himself was back on the air this morning, doing his “I’m contrite but I’m really a decent person” thing before beginning his two-week suspension on Monday. I caught him with one of his enablers, Paul Begala, who turned in a performance that could only be described as icky.
If Imus’ bosses were really serious about punishing Imus for his “nappy-headed hos” crack, why are they giving him a week to spin this his way before giving him a timeout?
More: Is the Globe’s front-pager on Barack Obama’s restrained reaction to Imus really a story? Squaring the Globe says no.
I’ll be on “The Paul Sullivan Show” on WBZ (AM 1030) tonight at 9:30 to talk about Imus. Then, tomorrow morning at 7:30, I’ll be on WUML (91.5 FM). The subject: the I-Man again.
I’ve never thought Imus was a racist. Nor do I think he blurted out “nappy-headed hos” in order to goose his ratings. Nevertheless, he and his crew have repeatedly crossed the line over the years. This isn’t Michael Savage-style hate radio — rather, these are old men playing at being naughty boys. Still, Imus and company’s act is old and offensive, and it’s time to bring it to an end. A two-week suspension? Please.
A Media Nation reader has challenged me to back up my assertion that no one has complained to WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) about Imus’ racist language because, well, no one listens.
It’s a fair point, though proving it is not as easy as it might seem. But there is certainly some evidence that the I-Man is not as big in Boston as he used to be.
Ideally, I would look at Arbitron’s ratings for weekday mornings among listeners in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic. Unfortunately, companies pay a lot of money for those ratings, and no one’s going to give them to me.
On the Arbitron Web site, I can get data on overall ratings for Boston radio stations among listeners 12 and older. Since these numbers are not broken down by time slot, they’re not much good. For what it’s worth, though, the station came in ninth last fall, the most recent quarter for which numbers are available. News and/or talk stations that finished ahead of WTKK were WBZ (AM 1030), WRKO (AM 680) and WEEI (AM 850). And you can be sure that public station WBUR (90.9 FM), with a news and talk line-up, finished well ahead of ‘TKK, since its morning drive-time ratings are invariably strong — something not reflected in the Arbitron rankings, which only include commercial stations.
I also searched the archives of the Globe and the Herald for the past two years. Although I could not come up with anything definitive, I did find the following from the Herald’s “Inside Track,” published in September 2005:
Ratings-wise, “Imus in the Morning” isn’t exactly a powerhouse for ‘TKK in that all-important male 25-54 age group.
In the last five ratings books — Spring 2004 to Spring 2005 — the perennially PO’d morning man weighed in after WEEI’s sports yakkers Dennis & Callahan; Howard Stern’s strippers-on-parade on WBCN; and all-news WBZ-AM. Classic rock WZLX even beat him a few books back.
Again, WBUR probably beat Imus, too.
The bottom line is that Imus is no ratings monster in Boston. Stern’s gone, of course, but it seems eminently reasonable to assume that three news and/or talk stations — WBZ, WEEI and WBUR — all do better than “Imus in the Morning.”
If anyone has more definitive numbers than this, please pass them along, and I’ll be glad to post them.
I’m not surprised that Boston’s WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) says it’s received no complaints about Don Imus’ racist prattle on Wednesday. Who knew he was still on the air?
The Herald’s Jessica Heslam has the details. Imus’ apology has been posted on MSNBC.com. Here’s some background on Imus’ previous racist, misogynistic and homophobic outbursts.
I think it’s time — past time — for Imus to retire to the ranch. And he can take his little pal Bernard McGuirk with him.
The Tracksters report in today’s Boston Herald that John Dennis and Gerry Callahan may move from WEEI (AM 850) to WBCN (104.1 FM) when their contract expires later this summer. As is always the case with radio, this is a battle of corporate titans, as WBCN is owned by CBS and WEEI by Entercom.
Which reminds me — is it just my imagination, or are the jocks on ‘EEI talking about baseball less since the Red Sox moved to sister station WRKO (AM 680)? It seems that every time I tune in lately, they’re talking about the Celtics’ draft prospects, a subject that I imagine must be about as popular with most sports fans as, oh, double-entry bookkeeping.
What’s next? The Bruins? Good grief.
When UMass Lowell announced last fall that it would stop funding Christopher Lydon’s radio show, “Open Source,” you had to wonder if its days were numbered. Fortunately, it stayed on the air — and now appears to have some guaranteed longevity.
Last week, the program announced that it’s received a $250,000 MacArthur grant “in support of the innovative use of internet-based tools in the production of a daily public radio program.”
Lydon and company have made a big deal out of using the Web to generate program ideas and discussion. Frankly, I’m somewhat skeptical of how crucial that’s been. The main thing is that “Open Source” is a good program, bringing back to the air one of Boston’s most distinctive voices.
I’ve been complaining a lot about the state of talk radio in Boston recently. Today I want to point out that you can fill up a pretty good part of your weekday with high-quality, locally based talk shows. Consider:
I’m not deliberately leaving out conservatives. Sullivan is pretty conservative, and I’d be the first to admit that many of the great talk-show hosts of the past were conservative — David Brudnoy, Jerry Williams and Gene Burns foremost among them. (I’d round out that trio with Peter Meade, who’s a liberal.)
The problem now is that the morning and afternoon drives are a talk-radio wasteland. On WRKO (AM 680), Tom Finneran shows some promise, so maybe the 6 to 10 a.m. slot won’t be a total vacuum.
In the afternoon, though, when NPR starts to drag, you’re stuck with Howie Carr on WRKO and Jay Severin on WTKK. Both can be entertaining at times. But you won’t respect yourself in the morning.
Clea Simon reports in today’s Globe that local radio executives are excited about four Boston talk-show hosts’ being named to the Talkers magazine “2007 Heavy Hundred.”
Well, now. Boston is the ninth-largest radio market in the country. Yet the local “Heavy Hundred” winners are essentially also-rans, with Howie Carr (WRKO, AM 680) coming in at #50, Jay Severin (WTKK, 96.9 FM) at #66 and John Dennis and Gerry Callahan (WEEI, AM 850) at #93. Granted, most of the top 50 hosts are nationally syndicated, but this doesn’t strike me as much to get excited about.
And here’s something to ponder. Though the majority of the top-ranked hosts are conservatives, with Rush Limbaugh coming in at #1, there are some liberal and left-wing hosts near the top, too. Ed Schultz is ranked fifth. Randi Rhodes is #13. Alan Colmes is #16. Stephanie Miller is #36.
What do they have in common? With the exception of Colmes, they could all be heard in Boston on Clear Channel’s weak-signaled “Progressive Talk” stations until December, when the stations were converted to Spanish-language programming.
You think they might do well in liberal Massachusetts if they were put on a station where you could actually hear them? Yeah, I think so, too. Here are the folks who are trying to make that happen.