Friday, April 13, 2007

Life after Imus

Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine has some good thoughts on the Imus affair—or as he refers to it, Imus’ “macaca moment.”

He admits he’s no fan of Imus and applauds his firing. He believes that in this case, Imus’ true character was revealed and that firing was something he’s had coming for a long time.

However, he warns against setting black & white, zero tolerance standards. He points out that people are human and make mistakes. Instances like this won’t always demonstrate a fatal character flaw, but will sometimes be just an honest screw-up. The problem is that these screw-ups will be magnified 100 times on cable news and the Internet.

...Imus is a good case for discussion because what he said was truly offensive, it did reveal his essential character, and he met his justice beyond the sin of that one moment. But that won’t always be the case and even in the fast-forward society of internet and cable, we need to be able to judge thoughtfully and independently which are macaca moments and which are merely mistakes.

1 comments:

Don and Sher said...

Many of us have weighed in on this but Pat Buchanan had a great column on the subjecthttp://www.buchanan.org/blog/

Post a Comment