Rallying Around Racist LOSER Don Imus

 In the aftermath of the racial outburst that got talkshow host Don Imus' dropped from MSNBC--referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos"-- a Washington Post editorial (4/10/07) posed a question many critics have been asking for years: How do prestigious journalists defend their cozy relationship with a well-known bigot?

 As the Post put it: "But those who bask in the glow of his radio show ought to consider whether they should continue doing so. After all, you're judged by the company you keep." Since discovering Imus' long record of bigotry, misogyny and homophobia is not difficult (Slate, 4/10/07), it's a question reporters should have been asking long ago—FAIR posed the very same question to NBC's Tim Russert six years ago, for example (Action Alert, 3/1/00).

 When journalist Phil Nobile (TomPaine.com, 6/28/01) presented many top pundits with evidence of Imus' bigotry, few (of the white ones, anyway) seemed to think what Imus was saying should affect their decisions to appear on his program. Nobile noted that Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz wrote in his 1996 book Hot Air that "Imus's sexist, homophobic and politically incorrect routines echo what many journalists joke about in private."

 Really? Do Washington journalists really call people "thieving Jews"--and then make mock apologies, saying that the phrase is "redundant" (Imus in the Morning, 12/15/04)? Did they really call Clinton's attorney general "old Bigfoot shaky Janet Reno," taunting her for her Parkinson's disease (Imus in the Morning, 6/12/01)? Do they really laugh uproariously at the news of hundreds of Haitians drowning (Imus in the Morning, 3/20-24/00)? If so, Kurtz has been sitting on a great many scoops. [MORE]