Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Imus and The Blog Factor
by
An interesting observation I heard yesterday on CNN by one of the people being interviewed about the Imus controversy was the role blogs played by quickly intensifying the issue over the weekend. Imus made his remarks about the Rutger’s womens’ basketball team last Thursday on his show. As offensive as the message was, Imus after all is a shock jock, and the impact of yet another hurtful utterance at someone else’s expense might not have reached the tipping point had it been left to the more languid pace of mainstream media’s weekend reporting.
However, the blogging community picked up on this meme and it gathered considerable momentum all through the weekend. I started reading about it Saturday and a quick search of Tailrank showed it was an issue that wasn’t going to go away. You can also see from the following Technorati chart that the issue exploded in the blog community on Saturday:
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No one can say for sure how much of a role blogs played in quickly raising this issue to the forefront, but it seems reasonable to assume that blogs can have a major impact on the journalistic process. Blogs are often a cross between stories, thoughts and letters to the editor. Of course, in the case of blogs, the writer goes direct to the public and the editor is disintermediated.
While Imus’s remarks are repugnant, they don’t surprise me. Shock jocks are in essence paid to create controversy, controversy creates audiences, and audiences can be sold to advertisers for many millions of dollars. The networks aren’t paying Imus an eight-figure annual salary to be a nice guy. While it may seem comforting to some to think the two-week suspension imposed on Imus by MSNBC and CBS Radio is motivated out of corporate indignation, it is more reasonable to assume they are simply protecting a valuable asset with some relatively minor damage control.
At the end of that suspension, they will have to determine whether Imus is still an asset or if he has become a brand and monetary liability. That, and that alone, is what I believe will drive their ultimate decision. MSNBC and CBS Radio know all to well, that in a country that has an amendment guaranteeing free speech, but no amendment outlawing poor taste or a lack of tact, that even if they fired Imus, he would soon show up as a competitor somewhere else, perhaps as a separate channel on satellite radio with another shock jock by the name of Howard Stern.
