Don Imus deconstructed

One of the best assessments of Don Imus comes from Sports Illustrated's reliably straight-shooting Dr. Z, who unlike Don is a real journalist.

OK, let's get right into it. Hudson from San Francisco would like my take on the Imus situation. Fine. Here it is:

Imus represents a breed of journalists I call festering boils. They're professional irritants. They continue to fester, causing irritation, occasionally pain. Then, if we're lucky, they pop and they're gone. A couple of years ago Rush Limbaugh, another of this breed, festered on ESPN, a network that, unfortunately, I had to watch. Then he popped, with that Donovan McNabb viciousness, and he was gone. Thank God. Relief all around. At least he wouldn't be part of the football world any more.

The weakness of these people is that their continuing outrageousness gives them a feeling of invincibility and they step over the line and they overplay their hand. Rupert Murdoch's publishing whiz, Judith Regan, who was going to publish that O.J. Simpson book, If I Did It, went over the line and she was canned. She left in her wake another of her brainstorms, another piece of this irritant-type of trash, Peter Golenbock's 7, the Mickey Mantle Novel, detailing a fictitious affair between Mantle and Marilyn Monroe.

That's the book Regan proudly sponsored, and they're all of a piece, Golenbock, Regan, Imus, Howard Stern, Limbaugh. There is little wit or intelligence involved in what they do, very little evidence of work involved or hard research to back up their pronouncements. Be loud, be outrageous, is what their sponsors want, and they oblige.

Now Imus, who has been a professional irritant for years, went over the line and popped.

He's gone from his two major outlets. CBS Radio did an assessment of the balance sheet, which is how corporate people adjust their morality, and decided that whatever financial gain Imus might generate in the future would be offset by the loss of advertising revenue, plus image, when Al Sharpton's activism would be felt. If the network would have canned him right away, I'd have been impressed. But while it was deliberating, I heard the whirl and click of the tumblers, the ring of the cash register. Someone else surely will pick him up, because there are always those who tune in to people such as Imus. Oh, it'll be from a high moral plane, of course, about how he has seen the error of his ways and repented and so forth. It will be the return of a familiar irritant, the same old boil. All we can hope for will be that he'll be even worse next time, that the pop will be louder. And more permanent.