BOB GARFIELD:
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In 2002, Talkers magazine rated Don Imus the third greatest radio or TV talk show host of all time, behind Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, and ahead of Larry King. Heard on 90 radio stations and simulcast on MSNBC, Imus in the Morning reaches roughly three and a half million people every single week, or used to reach.

He's been canned, because last week he said something sexist and racist and indisputably offensive. But, of course, he or his staff did that every week.
IMUS:
As a matter of fact, both teams played most of the game like a bunch of polio-stricken bitches last night.
[LAUGHTER]
As a matter of fact, the Knicks got booed more in their own house than Rosie O'Donnell in a live sex show, I understand!
[LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It had to be one heck of a slow news week for the media to be shocked – shocked - by a show hiding in plain sight for decades, raking in mountains of cash. It made its fortune with a two-part format, one part reveling in sex and routinely offending blacks, gays and women, and one that hosted highbrow political discussion with the media elite.

Tim Russert, Jeff Greenfield and Frank Rich regularly appeared on that part. And if the show hadn't been killed, they probably would have again. As CBS newsman and Imus regular Bob Schieffer told The Washington Post this week, "I'm not going to sever a relationship with someone who has apologized for what he said. I hate what he did, but he's still my friend."

In America, we are inclined to celebrate tastemakers who are utterly lacking in taste. Not all of us, of course. Back in May of 2000, Clarence Page, Washington columnist for The Chicago Tribune, asked Imus to take a pledge.
CLARENCE PAGE:
Are you raising your hand?
IMUS:
I have it up.
CLARENCE PAGE:
Okay. Number one, I, Don Imus--
IMUS:
I, Don Imus––

CLARENCE PAGE:
––do solemnly swear…
IMUS:
––do solemnly swear––
CLARENCE PAGE:
––that I will promise to cease all simian references to black athletes––
IMUS:
––that I will promise to cease all simian references to back––black athletes––
[LAUGHTER]
CLARENCE PAGE:
––abandon all references to non-criminal blacks as thugs, pimps, muggers and Colt-45 drinkers.
IMUS:
I promise to do that.
CLARENCE PAGE:
Very good. How about an end to Amos and Andy cuts, comparison of New York City to Mogadishu and all parodies of black voices, unless they are done by a black person, 'cause you're really not very good at it?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The pledge was immediately and inevitably broken. But for Page, that wasn't the point. The point was to make his position clear. He liked being on the serious part of Imus in the Morning, he told us a few years back, but he didn't want his presence to imply endorsement of the outrages committed in the other part.
CLARENCE PAGE:
I personally feel that I and other pundits should not go on if we have serious objections to some of the show's material, unless Don does give us the opportunity to address those concerns, as he did with me. Now, why I haven't been invited on the show since, I don't know. [LAUGHS] I haven't troubled myself to call and ask.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Imus didn't need Page. He had a roster of willing guests.
FRANK RICH:
The reason I go on his show is very, very simple.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Frank Rich is a New York Times columnist and he was an Imus regular. I spoke to him back in 2001, obviously not about this incident, but countless others, like when Imus made fun of the Parkinson's tremors of Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno, or when he described reporter Gwen Ifill as a "cleaning lady." But Rich said that wasn't all there was to Imus.
FRANK RICH:
It's the only show I know of in commercial broadcasting that I've been on where you can actually talk in an informed way, not in sound bites, about the issue of the day with someone with whom you can match wits and who really knows his stuff. For the space when he's talking to a journalist or a politician or an author, you know, it plays to me like Terry Gross, quite frankly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
But if the serious parts were Terry Gross, then the satire, according to Rich, was closer to Alfred E. Neuman.
FRANK RICH:
It plays as sometimes juvenile speech at the level of say, Mad magazine or Paul Krassner's The Realist, which is what it aspires to and hits and misses. I don't feel by appearing on the show that I'm endorsing the worst offenders, but also I feel, in the context of entertainment, to me it plays, in context, in the show – it doesn't play as hate speech.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Maybe. But in a 1997 interview with Mike Wallace, Imus admitted that he hired some staff to make racist jokes.
MIKE WALLACE:
You told Tom Anderson, the producer, in your car coming home, that Bernard McGuirk is there to do "nigger" jokes.
IMUS:
Well, I’ve ne––I never used that word.
MIKE WALLACE:
Tom?

TOM ANDERSON:
I'm right here.
IMUS:
Did I use that word?
TOM ANDERSON:
I recall you using that word.
IMUS:
Oh, okay. Well, then I used that word. But, I mean, of course, that was an off-the-record conversation.
[LAUGHTER]
But -
MIKE WALLACE:
The hell it was!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Back in 2001, I asked Mike Wallace why, knowing all that, he still went on the show.
MIKE WALLACE:
There's a lot, lot more to Imus than sophomoric and bigoted talk, a lot more. As I said, he reads, he thinks. He has an audience in Washington, I know, of all manner of – I hate to use the word “important” people but, in effect, they are people in the establishment there. And they listen. It's a kind of club, in effect. It's early morning, shaving in the mirror, taking–your–mind–off–your– troubles [LAUGHS] talk. What you're doing when you listen to that kind of thing or go on, you're not going after votes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What are you going after?
MIKE WALLACE:
[LAUGHS] Public recognition of a sort. That's the world we live in, Ms. Gladstone.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And especially the public recognition of young men, the kind of audience advertisers crave. Last year, Imus reportedly made 11 million dollars for his New York station alone. That can buy a lot of insulation. But it's not bulletproof.

Powerful friends and piles of cash couldn't protect Trent Lott. And though Ann Coulter doesn't seem to have suffered much for slurring John Edwards, Ann Coulter is, after all, a joke. Imus makes jokes, bad ones.

This latest was particularly bad, costing him not just a few of his regular guests but some of his big sponsors, including Proctor & Gamble and American Express. And to his network bosses, whatever they may have thought of his humor, that was no laughing matter.