Imus as Icarus…

…flying too close to the sun of PC wrath.

Tuesday, April 9—

Don Imus, the other shock-jock, may be needing the kind of gig that Howard Stern has on satellite radio.

Imus, who makes a living saying crude, obnoxious, derogatory things about what ever and whomever comes into his head, last week described the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s” after first commenting on their extravagant tatoos.

A firestorm of criticism shortly broke out, and yesterday morning Imus spent most of his show groveling and more-or-less apologizing. He was interviewed on Al Sharpton’s show Monday afternoon-I missed it, not sorry to have done so.

Today–

Late in the evening newscasts word came that MSNBC is cutting Imus loose permanently. WFAN, the radio station that carries his show and which MSNBC had simulcast, has not said he will lose that gig also, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Saying outrageous things about politicians is one thing, and considering the politicians who have been hammered by Imus, perhaps qualifies as a public service. But all the Rutgers women did was get to the NCAA finals, and display lots of tatoos. Imus needs to get out more. Young people from every background are inking up their bodies.

He lived by the sword, now, career-wise, he is dying by the sword. Of ad revenues, that is. Major advertisers were bailing on him since early this morning. Sic Transit Imusiana.

I enjoyed his show better than the broadcast morning “news” shows, which have become a blend of tabloid twittering and shameless huckstering of their respective network’s prime time shows and specials.

Imus consistently had more major news figures from the political world and op-ed pages of the press than all the broadcast morning shows put together. I will miss that about his show.

Fifteen Minutes Are Up

This morning, shortly after getting up, I heard an exclamation from the next room, where my beloved had just turned on the television. In shocked tones, she called out to me, “Anna Nicole Smith died!” Knowing that almost the first part of the paper Babs reads is the obituary page, for a moment I racked my sleep-fogged brain to place this name.

After brief fumbling, I realized the person in question was the former Playmate, widow of an ancient billionaire, perpetual fodder for tabloid press and television and all-round celebrity. Ah. Relief. I didn’t have to schedule a trip to a “viewing.” The older I get, the more such duties I perform. Feeling the cold, dank breath of mortality. Not yet. Not yet for me, anyway.

Something Rotten in NYC?

This past week the television news coverage was awash in a nasty smell one morning. In New York City, early morning commuters and residents were greeted with a smell of rotten eggs, strong enough to sicken even hardy New Yorkers. The coverage was so massive you would have thought American Idol’s new round of contests had begun.

Many photo ops of fearful person-on-the-street interviews later, I found one voice of reason coming from a NYC weather person. The city was experiencing a temperature inversion, in which a warm upper layer of air traps colder air below, preventing gasses from rising. It doesn’t take long in an urban environment for such an event to produce odd smells. It often happens that way in Chattanooga, surrounded by ridges and plateaus.

The reason such events get little local coverage in Chattanooga, much less national exposure, is of course because terror struck NYC so memorably on September 11, 2001. A temporarily inexplicable smell raises fears of poison gas attack, where once jokes might have been made about backed up sewers.

In spite of our heightened awareness of very real terror attacks, sometimes a smell is just a smell, not an emergency.

Talk Radio, Chattanooga and Personae

I just turned off the radio. I was listening to a local talk radio program on WGOW-FM. Since the program, “The Morning Press,” airs during morning “drive time,” much of the talk is newsweathersportstraffic (I run the words together on purpose.) Squeezed in between these sketchy infoblurbs, and great wads of commercials, sometimes ideas and opinions are exchanged, debated or outright ranted. It is to the actual talk of topical subjects that brings me back. That is what talk radio can be, and sometimes is.

Talk radio attunes itself to its target demographic, usually very conservative folks who are mad as hell about everything that has happened since the Norman Conquest. For the most part, the “Morning Press” pitches to that same demographic, always in plentiful supply, in Chattanooga as elsewhere in the country. The lead host in a three-way team, however, qualifies as “liberal” down here deep in the red heart of Primitivist Politics. Jeff Styles is his name, always a smooth, practiced voice, even when he says very little. Occasionally he says memorable things. This morning, the intro music for one half-hour was an insipid cover of the song George Jones made legendary, “He stopped loving her today.” Styles and his partners agreed that trying to cover a George Jones song in the same general style is to shoot yourself in the foot. And make all your listeners completely aware of how miserably you have failed. To underline this truth, Styles played a brief excerpt of the George Jones version. What a relief.

Styles’s relatively moderate political stance incites venom and heat from the core talk radio audience, which works well for the programs involving him. His cohorts are more in tune with the “conservative” audience, so those red in tooth and claw continue to listen and occasionally choke the phone lines with howls of outrage. I place quotation marks around the terms “liberal” and “conservative” because they seem mutually pejorative terms used by opposing sides, without much definition. It would be interesting to listen to a talk radio show focussing on the meaning of those terms sometime. Styles is on later in the day solo, for two hours. Not being in drive time, “F.R.E.D-the Show” is lighter on newsweathersportstraffic than the earlier show. It could work, I think.

Back to the early show. Styles is the guy in the dunking booth, politics/lifestyle wise, for this market. In the last half-hour of the show his polar opposite on the station, pseudonymously titled “Wallace W. Witkowski,” shows up. W3, as I shall call him, is cohost for the felicitously titled show “The Village Idiots,” following the drive time show. W3 sounds off on the last half hour of the earlier show as a gadfly to Styles and a lead-in to his own show.

If Styles is relatively “liberal” for Chattanooga, W3 is dead on as the persona to match the demographic of the aggressively blue-collar/no-collar angry red state audience. That is the core audience for his show, and W3 plays them like a well-worn country fiddle. Dropping his “g’s” and sprinkling folksy comments throughout the show, W3 leaves no excess of the despised liberals, actual or strawmen, unscorched. Rights and freedoms belong only to those plain folk who detest wine-tastings, quiche and art galleries. The Patriot Act? No danger to anyone who votes like a “real American,” i.e., Republican.

“Gitmo is where them is-lam-o-fash-ist evildoers belong, and we don’t need to be gentle with ‘em. Hell, water boardin’ ain’t no big thing. What about that reporter dude them terrists cut his head off, then videotaped the whole thing so his wife and moma could see it?”

The foregoing is my lame attempt to adopt the inimitable style of the W3 persona. The man behind the persona is shrewd, intelligent and evidently much better educated than would be consistent with that persona. I know this because a year or more ago, I heard W3 and his “Idiots” partner, J.R., on the paid program WGOW runs at noon, “Let’s Talk Money,” produced by an investment firm in Chattanooga. The topic was 401K retirement funds, discussing their proper use. I had the amazing experience in this show of hearing W3 speak in grammatically correct sentences, sometimes involving very complex and technical discussions. Not only that, W3 used more than one of “them polly-sib-attic” words-and correctly. I hope that none of his core audience was listening that day. They would have shaken their collective heads and muttered that W3 was “gettin’ above his raisin’.”

No danger of that. Talk Radio thrives on the clash of opinions and opposing views, rancorous and acrid as they can become. If radio folk find a persona that works, they don’t abandon it until the audience does. No sign that the demographic in Chattanooga which W3 attracts so well will change any time soon.

Watch out for them fancy words, W3, somebody might hear you.

Missing the Movies

In my youth, spanning the decade from 1950 to 1960, I grew from a home-dependent first grader to a teenager with a driver’s license. Somewhere towards the latter part of that decade, I became an independent moviegoer.

From the seventh grade, I was at a private school where my attendance at Saturday School was required, to remediate my poor performance academically. Following my classes, which never lasted past eleven a.m. (the teachers wanted some of their Saturday free, just like me), I would bum a ride downtown, on my way home. Home generally waited for a couple hours while I caught a movie.

Ramadi attacks: media versions

News reports on events in Ramadi, Iraq on Thursday and Friday. I saw a television news story on the insurgents in Ramadi. There were only a dozen shown, and the reporter said little damage was done by them. Following are some media reports on the action, and on coalition actions the next day. I am trying to get a fix on how different sources treat the same story. In these few entries, there seems to be consensus, with the exception of the author of the blog, and the points I have bolded in a couple of the stories.

-Fox News

December 3, 2005
…
On Thursday, the U.S. military played down reports by residents and
police of armed insurgents walking the streets and of widespread
attacks against American and Iraqi targets in the city. The military
said only one rocket-propelled grenade was fired at an observation
post, causing no casualties. News agencies did run videotape allegedly
shot in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, that showed armed
insurgents distributing Al Qaeda leaflets and firing mortar rounds.
…

-AP/New York Times
December 2, 2005
…
As part of that campaign, the U.S. military on Friday launched a new
offensive –Operation Shank — in Ramadi, capital of the
insurgent-ridden Anbar province. About 200 Iraqi army soldiers
and 300 U.S. Marines were taking part in the offensive, the
fifth in Ramadi since Nov. 16.

-Washington Post

December 2, 2005

BAGHDAD, Dec. 1 — Armed fighters claiming allegiance to
Abu Musab Zarqawi took to the streets of a western Iraqi
provincial capital Thursday in a fleeting show aimed at intimidating
Iraqi Sunni Arab leaders taking part in dialogue with U.S. Marines
in a stronghold of the insurgency, provincial officials, residents and
other witnesses said.
…
The U.S. military, which maintains Marine bases and thousands
of troops on the outskirts of Ramadi, denied the accounts of unrest,
saying that the city was largely calm Thursday and that insurgents
were manipulating the news media. “Today I witnessed inaccurate
reporting, use of unreliable sources, media using other media as
sources, an active insurgent propaganda machine, and the pack
journalism at its worse,” Capt. Jeffrey Pool, a spokesman for the
2nd Marine Division, said in an e-mail to news organizations.

The following two entries, the first from a soldier formerly in service
in the area, now at home, seem to have had two different Reuters
sources:

-from the blog
of blackfive (military blog author formerly in Iraq, Afghanistan)
December 2, 2005

News reports around the world trumpeted that insurgents had
taken over the city of Ramadi and attacked many Iraqi and
US bases in the area, overrunning and taking control of the city.
Sadly, this is exactly the kind of info that
gets most of the folks covering this war salivating. They have
blinded themselves to any good happening and circle like
buzzards waiting for the carcass to finally drop…
…
“They’ve taken control of all the main streets and other sections
of Ramadi,” a reporter for Reuters there said earlier. “I’ve seen
about 400 armed men controlling streets, some of which were
controlled by Americans before.”

-from Reuters
December 2, 2005
U.S. and Iraqi troops launched an operation designed to disrupt
guerrilla activity in Ramadi on Friday ahead of Iraq’s
December 15 elections, one day after insurgents staged a show of
force in the western city.
…
Insurgents launched a brief assault in Ramadi on Thursday firing
mortar rounds and rockets at a U.S. base and local government
buildings.

Leaflets were distributed saying that al Qaeda in Iraq, the group
led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al Zarqawi, was taking
control of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar. But after a couple
of hours, most of the militants dispersed and the city appeared
to return to relative calm.

There also seems to be a discrepancy between a reported
death in Ramadi between the NYT and the coalition spokesman,
Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch.

-from NYT

December 2, 2005
…
Other new deaths announced Friday included a soldier
serving alongside Marine units in Ramadi, 50 miles west of
Falluja, who was killed by rocket fire on Thursday

-CNN
December 2, 2005
…
Lynch, the coalition spokesman, strongly disputed reports of
widespread insurgent attacks in Ramadi on Thursday. He said
that one attack, involving a rocket-propelled grenade,
occurred Thursday and that it caused no damage or casualties.
…

Okay, so two newspapers, two news wire services, one blog and
two cable news oraganizations are less than exhaustive as a
survey. And Ramadi was one non-incident. It is notable in my
opinion that the preceding statement sums up the judgement of
all the sources I cited. An isolated and ineffectual staged
event. Except for the one soldier reported dead by the NYT.

The army spokesperson quoted maintained that nobody was
KIA in Ramadi on Thursday. Without a lot more digging, I will
not be able to resolve that discrepancy. It may be that there
was an isolated and unrelated incident in Ramadi that killed
the soldier. I don’t know. I intend to do more of this sort of
picking through varying reports of events and conditions in
Iraq, for my own satisfaction.

Positions on the truth or bias
in media reports tend to be quite rigid, I have found. Most
internet “discussions” resemble opposing sides closing their
ears, opening their mouths and shouting each other down, or
trying to do so. There ought to be more focus on facts and
less on polemics. The issues are vast, the evidence tangled
and frequently contradictory, often leading to people simply
reinforcing the fixed opinions of their like-minded partisans.