Date: 12/05/07

Imus Returns to the Airwaves

By SAMANTHA GROSS
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) Don Imus' critics assailed him for a racially charged on-air remark that got him fired. On his return to the airwaves, he brought with him some young black cast members.

It remained to be seen whether his newly diversified lineup and his pledge to foster a dialogue on race relations would quiet his critics and soften any future blows dealt in a show that Imus himself said is built in part on making fun of others.

"I can only wait and see if his deeds will follow up his words," said the Rev. Al Sharpton, one of the strongest voices calling for Imus' firing after the shock jock called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos."

"The fact that he now has a black sidekick and that he's on delay clearly may speak of some of the measures that his new employers have put in to make sure that there's not a repeat offense," Sharpton said.

Phil Boyce, WABC program director and a Citadel Broadcasting Corp. vice president, said he could not say whether race played a role in hiring black comedians Karith Foster and Tony Powell because Imus himself chose the new additions. Citadel owns WABC and four of the 21 other stations broadcasting the show, which premiered Monday, eight months after Imus, 67, was fired from CBS Radio and the MSNBC cable network.

Also returning was Bernard McGuirk, the producer who instigated the Rutgers comment and was fired as well.

Calling herself Imus' "new sidekick," Foster said after the broadcast that she hoped those who were most angered by his comments could feel represented by her on the air.

"They want change, and what better way to incite change than from the inside?" she said.

Foster said her work on the show would be influenced by her experiences growing up in Plano, Texas, which she describes on her Web site as an "affluent suburb north of Dallas with the ethnic diversity of a Klan rally."

"I think I can speak from the viewpoint of an African-American, and especially one who can see and understand both sides," she said. "I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood but obviously my family is black. I have black friends, and I live in Harlem. I see and can understand where everybody's coming from, which I think makes for a great mediator."

Powell, whose stand-up credits include "Showtime at the Apollo," said his hiring was not a token gesture.

Imus "actually wanted to improve the quality of his show, and so he went out and he got talented individuals to help him improve the quality of the show," Powell said. "The proof is in the pudding and the proof is in the product."

But Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, remained skeptical.

"Why comedians?" she asked of the new hires. "That's the only thing women and blacks can do is be funny? I don't find that encouraging."

But, she added, "We have to wait and see what their contributions in fact are."

Boyce countered that Foster was more than a stand-up comic. Before appearing on NBC's "Last Comic Standing" and other shows, she was a production team member on ABC's "The View," he noted.

Besides, he said: "We're doing a radio show. Our job here is to be interesting and entertaining."

Michael Harrison, publisher of industry trade journal Talkers magazine, said the presence of a black man and a woman on the show could help soften the impact of any future comments Imus makes. For example, he said, sidekick Robin Quivers had helped shock jock Howard Stern with perceptions among women.

Foster, who said she was appalled by Imus' Rutgers comment, said she wouldn't give the host any undeserved soft landings.

"I'm not going to be a sycophant," she said. "If and when I need to, I will speak up. That's who I am. That's how I was raised."

In an apologetic 15-minute monologue before a live audience, Imus promised to use his second chance to discuss race relations. People paid $100 a ticket to see Monday's show, with the proceeds going to Imus' charity.

"I will never say anything in my lifetime that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me," he said.

Even after all the uproar, it appeared Imus could still draw high-profile guests. Monday's lineup included noted presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and presidential hopefuls Chris Dodd and John McCain.

In the end, Harrison predicted, the spotlight on Imus will simply fade away, while the host continues "to be the equal opportunity offender which people know he is."

"The people who are interested in this issue will lose interest in Imus because they have bigger fish to fry," he said.

By The Associated Press

Shock jock Don Imus' monologue as he returned to the airwaves Monday morning during a live broadcast on WABC-AM:

"In thinking about what happened—and most of you know I haven't talked to anyone and didn't see any point in going on some sort of Larry King tour to offer a bunch of lame excuses for making essentially a reprehensible remark about innocent people who did not deserve to be made fun of—I think what happened is about what should have happened.

"I think one has to realize, and I certainly do, that you don't get to decide, nor should you, how the news media is going to treat a remark you made, or the kind of remark I made. You don't get to decide whether they're going to put it in context; you can't whine and complain if you pick up The New York Times and in an essay about the wonderful, brilliant legal mind of (Imus attorney) Martin Garbus, read that what you said was a racist tirade.

"And every time I would start to get pissed off about that, I would remind myself that if I hadn't have said what I said, then we wouldn't be having this discussion and I wouldn't have to deal with that. And the women at Rutgers wouldn't have to deal with it.

"And every time I would start to get pissed off about that, I would remind myself that if I hadn't have said what I said, then we wouldn't be having this discussion and I wouldn't have to deal with that. And the women at Rutgers wouldn't have to deal with it.

"On April 12th, we did the show and we were scheduled to meet with the team that night at the governor's mansion in Princeton, no one knew that, so around 4 o'clock that afternoon, I got a call from (CBS Corp. chief executive) Les Moonves at CBS, and he said we can't take the pressure and we're going to have to pull the plug and I said I understood that.

"While I knew I wasn't still working for (Sirius CEO) Mel Karmazin or (Citadel Broadcasting CEO) Farid Suleiman, Les Moonves could not have been more honorable or more straightforward or more decent or more honest in dealing with me.

There was never any point that he said 'Ah, everything's going to be fine,' or whatever. We understood the gravity of the remark. We understood the consequences for the young women at Rutgers. We all recognized, I certainly did, that it was just a matter of time before he did what he had to do.

"So the meeting with the team was, as I mentioned, at the governor's mansion in Princeton ... So I started getting telephone calls, because it was fairly big news that I had been fired, wondering if I was still going to show up, from a couple of people who were involved in the meeting. We were already on our way.

"We had a decoy car so nobody could follow us, because nobody was supposed to know about the meeting. We pull up at the governor's estate there, and there's all kinds of news media.

"And I'm thinking: how did they? And it turns out they were there because Governor Corzine had been in this horrible accident. I didn't know any of that.

"We met with the team, (Imus' wife) Deirdre and I, for about four hours. And I had said earlier in the week in apologizing that I was a good person who had said a bad thing. And I thought about how irrelevant that was. Because whether you're a good person or not is completely unrelated. It doesn't give you a license to make any kind of remark you feel like making and it doesn't minimize the impact it's going to have on who you make it about.

"And I realized that had we been on the air and had we been talking about somebody else, and had somebody else said that about something they said, we would have made horrible fun of them.

"But I did think it was important, whether I'd been fired or not, to meet with the team and to tell them a little bit about myself, about what my life had been about, to apologize to them and to ask them to forgive me. I don't know if it's melodramatic to describe it as a life-changing experience, but it was pretty close.

"It lasted about four hours. The coach spoke first, about 30 minutes. Talked about her father, who had been injured in a mine accident. Which I had been. I didn't mention it to the coach that night.

"The coach is a wonderfully interesting, fascinating figure and moved the entire room to tears, with her talk about not only what had happened but about her life and her struggles that she had had.

"And then I spoke. I wanted them to know what this show was about. That that's what we did. We make fun of people. That I had done a lot of good things in my life.

"I don't know if you know, but sometimes when you're talking to somebody, like in an argument with a spouse or something, you hear yourself talking and you realize how foolish you sound. And as I was talking to these young women, I realized that it was, other than placing in context for them who I was and that I wasn't some vicious racist and that this is what we did for a living, make fun of people, that was so irrelevant to how they felt.

"It sounded to me, as I listened to myself talk and as I looked at them, it sounded like just one lame excuse after another. That I had done this for autism. That I had done this for kids with cancer. Well, that's wonderful. We're happy you're a swell person. But don't say stuff like this about us that is reprehensible, that is not true, that humiliates us, and it places us in the eye of this hideous storm that we neither deserve nor asked for.

"And they each said that in the next three hours. I think the reason they accepted my apology is because I was able to place in context who I was, but more importantly: They didn't think that I was saying they were prostitutes, but they didn't think it was funny, either.

"And they don't think it's funny when I say it. And they don't think it's funny when (black comic) D.L. Hughley says it, and when Damon Wayans ... I mean I appreciate both of those wonderful comedians trying to place in context the hypocrisy of how come they can say it and I can't, when, the truth is, none of them should say it. And they should go talk to those young women at Rutgers if they want to know how they feel about it. Because they don't think it's funny.

"And I thought, as we were sitting there and listening to them, and some of their parents were there, and their grandparents. One woman was this far from my face, screaming. And you could just feel her heart break. And I was thinking, I mean it sounds stupid, but how fortunate it was that I had been fired. Because had I been there talking to them and apologizing to them and offering them these excuses and still had my job, that's what they would have thought.

They would have thought that I was there to try to save my job. And that might have been true. But I was there to try to save my life. I had already lost my job.

"And so they forgave me. They accepted my apology. And they said they would never forget. And I said that I would never forget.

"And I analogize it to being an alcoholic and a drug addict, which I also am. If you get into recovery, as I am, for 20-some years now, you have the opportunity to be a better person, to have a better life than you ordinarily would have had. And that's true in this situation.

"It was demonstrated to these young women that there are consequences for things you say. Would I rather have not gone through it and have them go through it? Absolutely. But as I said at the beginning of these few minutes, I think things worked out the way they should have worked out.

"We now have the opportunity to have a better program, to obviously diversify the cast. That just makes sense. But the program is not going to change. It was a great radio program. It's on a better radio station, one of the great iconic radio stations in the history of broadcasting, WABC in New York. I mean, you couldn't make that up.

"And as you know, I have a special place in my heart, Charles and I, for RFD-TV, which is already in 30 million homes and if y'all don't have it on your cable system, you call and tell them you want it.

"So I will never say anything in my lifetime that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me.

"And no one else will say anything on my program that will make anybody think that I didn't deserve a second chance.

"And in a way, we all, the women at Rutgers and me and the folks on this program, get the opportunity to demonstrate to them and to everybody else that we're willing to have an ongoing discussion about race relations in this country. I know the media was talking about, as soon as they could get me out of the room, they were going to have this national dialogue on race relations in the major media and what could or couldn't be said on radio and television; I must have missed that.

"But I'm willing and I have an obligation and will do that the same way we talked about, I know it drove some of you crazy, when we started talking about autism, nobody knew what the hell we were talking about. Or when we passed the Combating Autism Act, few people understood and many were annoyed that I wouldn't shut up about it. When we started talking about the death benefits for soldiers, I mean it went on for months and months.

"There isn't any reason we can't do that to learn how to talk to one another. And so I pledge to do that. And you'll see evidence on this program.

"But other than that, not much has changed. Dick Cheney is still a war criminal. Hillary Clinton is still Satan. And I'm back on the radio."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.