April 13th, 2007 at 9:44 am
I took in a little Hannity & Colmes last night and saw Elisabeth Hasselbeck discussing the Imus firing. Video and other people’s commentary are available at Hot Air.
To my amazement I found myself agreeing with both Hannity and Colmes in my disagreement with Hasselbeck. Hasselbeck found the decision to fire Imus good while not saying the same for Rosie’s mocking of Chinese speech. Imus was malicious, Rosie was not, and so Rosie should stay while Imus should go.
If Hasselbeck wants to avoid saying anything about a co-worker, that’s fine. She should say that, rather than condone O’Donnell’s behavior. Using intent to determine whether someone should be fired is asking for the employers to be mind-readers.
Regardless of what O’Donnell and Imus say, they have a right to say it. Their advertisers have the right to pull funding when they don’t like what they say. ABC and CBS, respectively, have the right to fire them when they don’t pull in enough revenue.
CBS’s behavior is suspect. Surely if Imus knew such speech was going to get himself canned, he wouldn’t have done it. The dismissal seems to have come without warning and incongruently with the rest of his “shock jock” speech. It is bad corporate behavior to not give a warning for an employee’s behavior that is not explictly codified as against the rules. It’s a little unfair to Imus for him to find out after the fact that there are just certain people you can’t ridicule.
I don’t listen to Imus, and I don’t watch The View. I don’t need to. There are simply principles at play.
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April 13th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
The fact of the matter is we are not dealing with a principle that says “it is wrong to make fun of someone based on their race, ethnicity, gender, etc.” or that it is simply wrong to be mean. We are dealing with a political principle. At least NAACP, NOW, and other organizations like this are. I went to a college that was really big on “social justice” and their definition of racism is that it has to be perpetrated by a group in political power over a group that is not. So they would say it was a white man (and whites have the political power) using his influence to harm young black women. (so white vs. black, men vs. women). Any “ism” has this definition. If it were a black man saying this about a Jewish person, it would simply be prejudiced and not nice.
Asians maybe don’t hold political power, but they do have affluence. As a culture, they perform well in schools and in testing that are regarded as generally being culturally biased, they value education and lucrative careers (again, as a cultural more). So, the idea is that they wouldn’t be as harmed by what Rosie did (though offended) as what the message Don Imus was trying to portray by continuing to propogate an idea of beauty, social behavior, intelligence, and racial stereotyping.
I’m not saying that I agree with this, and in general, you won’t have a media person try to explain this because they know how the public in general would react to it, but this the basic ideology.