Gwen Ifill was Joan of Arc on Meet the Press this morning, taking on Tim Russert and David Brooks directly. What a wonderful look of admiration for Gwen went across Eugene Robinson's face. Russert is one of the big babies who misses his favorite toy. He kept wheedling to try to get everybody to say Imus should come back and be a racial reconciliator. If NBC wants to put on a racial reconciliator, why pick this guy?

I don't understand how the sponsors let this go on for so long, especially on MSNBC. Imus' older white male audience is not the target audience for Proctor and Gamble's advertisements and his abuse was directed mostly at women, who ARE P&G's targeted customers.

"Ifill often irks me by coming off as a little too cool and a little too cynical on many issues."

I get that impression as well.  Maybe the carapace she mentioned in her NYT op-ed has gotten too thick.   That said, her comments on this issue have been pitch perfect.

As a privileged user of the public's airwaves,with only conditional free speech, Imus had no right to make the remarks he made. rehundt

Why? Is there a law against saying what he said?

Actually, Imus had every "right" to call the Rutgers' women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." The only thing he didn't have a "right" to was his job.

nope

Yes, but Hunt made it clear he doesn't believe the First Amendment doesn't apply to television when he advocated taking broadcast licenses away from stations that aired "anti-Kerry propaganda". Ever since Josh Marshall gave him a platform for this, instead of denouncing it, I've read his words as the output of a Democratic party spin doctor, not as the journalist he started out as.

Should stations using the public airwaves for free be allowed to sell that air time to broadcast lies? Do they have NO burden to ascertain the veracity of what they put on the public air for their own profit?

Agreed; although falsely charging a woman with specific (and in some states, generalized) unchaste conduct is automatically defamatory.

You're right, and that's why WhiteRose is basically wrong. If you're successfully sued for defamation for saying something, it's obvious that you DON'T have the right to say it. If you had the right, you'd have won the case.

The state doesn't criminalize defamation, but it does inhibit it by giving citizens the right to recover for damage done to their reputations by unbridled free speech. We don't have the right to defame each other.

You're way off.
It's not clear at all that Hundt is "advocating the suppression of speech by the government that he finds offensive."
He's advocating the suppression of exactly what I said--the dissemination for profit of lies over the public airwaves. Why is that wrong? Kellogg's isn't allowed to air ads saying that eating Post cereals will kill you. Why should the right wingers be allowed to air ads that lie about Kerry's military service?

In fact, your accusation is preposterous. I'm sure Hundt finds speeches by Bush and Cheney (not to mention John Bolton, Trent Lott, etc.) offensive, but wouldn't advocate their "suppression by the government!"

BTW, "we" do allow the KKK and the American Nazis to exercize their freedom of assembly, but cops certainly don't always allow them to select their parade routes. They are often denied permits to march through neighborhoods in which their presence would incite violence.

The government stops you from saying it by allowing people to sue you and recover damages for saying it.

You're defining "right" in an odd way. The government quite rightly relegates many non-violent conflicts between individuals to the civil law. Doctors who negligently harm patients are sued by their victims, not imprisoned by the state. To you, does that mean they have the "right" to negligently harm their patients? Ask your family doctor, if you're in doubt.

The fact that you can be sued for defamation means you don't have the right to defame. Seems kind of obvious.

Hundt clearly said that Imus didn’t have the right to say what his did and he did so because it offended him. I vehemently disagree with that attitude.

As far as suppressing political ads. We allow wide latitude for very misleading political ads all the time. Why did Hundt’s antenna perk up only when an ad was hurting Kerry? I think it speaks to his motives of using the power of the state to suppress speech he doesn’t like. Of course wouldn’t ban everything all at once, he couldn’t get away with it. But, at the margins, you bet.

As far as comparing Kellogg’s ads to political ads, clearly you understand the difference between political speech and commercial speech?

For years radio shock jocks, of which Imus was one, have known there were lines they weren't supposed to cross, under the law. One of the tricks of their tawdry trade was to use others -- stooges, tapes of bad actors, quotes, callers on the phone -- to introduce offensive material, so the "host" could make light of it

You were probably not listening as well as you should have been. Bernard McGuirk brought the subject up, made the comment first, and Imus played off it, rather badly. McGuirk, as producer, is the one to analyze the ARBs, figure out where his audience is slipping, and juice them up with sweeps staring him in the face.

Imus should have called McGuirk out as he has many times when McGuirk has gone over the line, but he didn't. I attribute this more to the general slippage of the show and Imus' extensive run on television. I would postulate if Imus had only been on radio, the remarks would have gone unnoticed. Television may have only been a small slice of the total audience, but I believe it to be a much more important one in this regard.

Alphonse ( Al ) Kada
Iranians are fighting the Americans in Iraq so they don't have to fight them on the streets of Tehran

Imus should apologize to the Rutgers ladies and stop kissing Al Sharpton's ass.

However, he didn't insult every black person on earth and, obviously, not Sharpton.

As Ann Coulter wisely observed, "If Imus had called the basketball players "fat, race-baiting black men with clownish hairstyles," well, then perhaps Sharpton would be owed an apology."

That wasn't an ad about Kerry that got Hundt in '04--it was an ostensible news program spreading malicious lies. This was the Sinclair Broadcasting debacle, not the Swifties themselves.

Should the state say that the news is required to not willfully and maliciously lie to the public? I wouldn't have a problem with that at all.

And we don't often hear a lot of Nazis and skinheads on public airwaves for that matter, do we?

Reed's mistake is saying that "Imus" did not have the right to say this. The issue here is, as with the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction is whether WFAN and the CBS syndicates violated FCC code regarding permissible speech on the airwaves. This does not, of course, apply to the MSNBC cable broadcast which is not regulated by the FCC.

(This is, of course, a little ironic, because the TV audience is more likely to have been offended than the radio audience.)

Robert: Are you suggesting that the right to a radio job is the same as having a right to use that job to injure people? The job may provide him with the means to go beyond his rights, but not the right to do so. If he says the same thing at the new job, injured parties can then begin the process anew.
Pantheon

I know it is difficult to understand, but Imus has the right to say the same thing again. It wouldn’t be very smart since he would probably get sued again, but depending on the target he might not. The government does not have the right to stop him.

By the way there is no “right to a radio job”.

What was more telling is that:
1) Howard Kurtz, David Gregory, and Tim Russert did not recuse themselves as the moderators for the sections of their programs dedicated to discussion of Imus, since they had appeared on the show.
2) It is obvious that these Male MSM elite had blinders on when it came to Imus' humor. Gregory and Russert believe that their friend should be brought back on immediately to become a "racial conciliator".
While there are much more pressing things going on other than Imus, the inability of the press to address an obvious conflict of interest. If MSM can't address the bias of many hosts in favor of Imus, how can they ever come to grips with bias favoring the GOP Noise Machine?

There is a semantic, rather than substantial, dispute here because some people are reading "constitutional" before right, and other people are reading "legal" before right.

And the legal consequences of defaming someone are common law. They are in the residual powers reserved to the states.

And, further, the Constitutional protections afforded to speech in non-congestible media simply do not extend as far in a congestible medium. Intrinisically, not every citizen has the ability to be heard on the broadcast spectrum, and so licensing is required, and speech in that medium is under more limit, in recognition of the privilaged position enjoyed by license holders.

True. We should take a hard look at it, and then as CSNY sang, "teach, the children well . . " but not just with words, by example.

Honor: Ilsa's and Rick's decisions in Casablanca.

Very nice. But there are criminal forms of speech. In Canada, "Criminal Defamation" is a recognized though mostly unused portion of the Criminal Code.

It's been used in stalking cases where one person pursues a vendetta against another.

There's also a variety of criminal sanctions against violent speech. "Utter Threats to Kill" and "Inciting a Riot."

Leave a death threat on an answering machine, or have it broadcast on television, see how fast you get thrown into irons.

There's a fair bit of latitude on death threats, since how it is construed or understood is as vital as the wording in most jurisdictions.

Criminal assault can take the form of speech. Thus, to threaten violence against a person or property can result in criminal sanction.

Meanwhile, there's a whole secondary category of obscenity, which applies to speech and all forms of representation.

Notwithstanding the fact that there's never been a satisfactory definition of obscenity, most jurisdictions have obscenity laws, and some are quite excessive in their prosecution of same.

But frankly, this isn't a matter of government regulation of speech. This is a matter of government regulation of a finite commodity - public airwaves, which are not unlimited and are allocated to users in the form of licenses. These licenses carry various conditions and restrictions with respect to content and subject matter. For instance, no one expects MTV to broadcast the Olympics, the Sci Fi Channel does not do triple X porn, etc. In part, specialty channels are confined by the terms of their licenses to their specialty subject matter. Its a commercial operation, not a center of free speech.

In any event, the Government did not punish anyone over Imus. The same cannot be said for the Janet Jackson nipple incident.

Instead, Imus was a victim of free speech. The free speech of those who heard him. In this case, so many people who heard or heard of Imus' offensive statements, including the alleged 'nappy headed ho's', their friends, families and supporters, exercised their own rights of free speech.

They did not have a nationally broadcast radio show or the backing of a major corporation.

Instead, they simply had their own individual voices, which they were entitled to, and which they employed by going to the internet, to the newspapers, to the media, by writing letters to sponsors, by writing letters to the network, to holding demonstrations if necessary, and supporting spokespersons who articulated their position.

As a result of this vast expression of free speech by 'little people', the sponsors dropped out. They had every right to do so. Ultimately, they can do whatever they want, but they're more interested in listening to the people who buy their products than the people who sell their products. Go figure.

The corporate overseers, listened to the little people, they listened to the sponsors, and they fired Imus.

For them, it was not a free speech issue, but simply a cost/benefit analysis. Well, thats soulless corporate shills for you.

But despite their empty dollars and sense, Imus free speech rights were not curtailed or circumscribed. He wasn't expressing free speech. He was selling a product - himself, that was used to sell other products. It was all business. Imus shit on his own brand for too many potential customers. End of story.

Let's stick to real free speech issues, and ignore the bullshit whining of self pitying racists, can we?

There's real things in the world.