Time ot take a deep breath all around

In my 30 years as a journalist in Texas, I imagine I have written as many as 1,500 opinion columns, ranging from sports to politics to religion to how my son cut his own hair at 4 years old and created a bald spot.
I’ve never been fired for anything I wrote (of course for half that time I worked for me and couldn’t afford to find anyone willing to work for me), but I got called on the carpet plenty. Either the publisher or the editor or a major advertiser or someone among the readership didn’t like this or that. It happens.
But each time I submitted or published a column, I took a deep breath and re-read what I had typed. It offers me a chance to re-examine the piece – to be sure what I was writing didn’t cross a line I knew existed in the sand of my public. My training and experience was my guidepost; in other words, I knew better.
Guess what? Don Imus knew better; he had been on the air for over 40 years until he forgot the “rules” and that deep breath. As a result, CBS ended the current phase of his radio career (don’t worry, there’s always satellite radio where the rules don’t exist).
The media highway is littered with the carcasses of former columnists, reporters, radio personalities and television anchors who made the kind of mistakes that warranted dismissal. Don Imus has been canned before for one reason or another and it will happen again.
Dan Rather lost his CBS Evening News anchor chair over a major mistake during a “60 Minutes II” report. Conservative Ann Coulter’s column was dropped by scores of newspaper after she used a nasty derogative remark pertaining to homosexuals in discussing former Senator John Edwards,
The media list is endless and it doesn’t stop there. Al Campanis gave a stupid answer on “Nightline” about the lack of African-American managers in baseball. He meant one thing and said it improperly. He got fired. Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder made a ignorant comment about the quality of African-American athletes and CBS Sports fired him as soon as it could.
An observation: the most sensitive topic in this nation is race. The old saying is not true – never discuss religion or politics with anyone. Americans, because of our charred history, cannot discuss race relations without striking raw, exposed nerves. Almost all of it has to do with history – discrimination, one of the reasons for the Civil War (which stopped, but never ended in many parts of the South), inequality and failure of respect for fellow human beings.
Sometimes, “get over it” is not the proper answer. However, old ingrained ignorances are difficult to erase. And it is SO prevalent because it is the easiest difference among people to identify. Well, most of the time. Until we change minds and hearts, we will never change actions.
Radio might be on a seven-second delay and “dump buttons,” to mute offensive language (those seven little magic words that cannot be said or heard) be employed. But it doesn’t prevent stupidity.
Live television has no such barrier of protection. Just as CBS and Viacom about Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” which results in fines in the millions of dollars from that nanny group, the FCC. It was obviously a situation which could not be controlled and live means live.
Yes it does, Mr. Imus.
Unlike the written word, which can be changed prior to print, once sounds that constitute words are uttered and leave the mouth, there is NO taking them back. They are out there for all to hear and in our modern world, where the entire world has instant access to visuals and audios, those words are disseminated in a flash – before most people have a chance to take a breath and react. It is certainly faster than most people have time to think and contemplate.
So, in the world of radio and television, the control must exist from within. That person has to take that inner breath and simultaneously think in an instant before actually verbalizing his or her thoughts. It’s one of the reasons that not any man, woman or child can become a radio talker, and even fewer can be seen on television.
Newspaper writers have themselves to police their own works and an additional layer of protection known as editors. When heinous mistakes are made, and people are feeling the ax, it usually means a writer AND editor goes – it is shared responsibility.
Let’s make NO mistake about who got Don Imus fired – Mr. Imus himself. And make no mistake about who pushed him out the door. It wasn’t Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or anyone on the Rutgers women’s basketball team; that’s just knee-jerk bigotry in action.
It was advertisers to whom all of us in the media are beholden. Paychecks in the newspaper world are issued based on two sources only – advertising dollars and subscription/single-copy sales. That’s IT! In our world, advertising (or as I have called it, “paid news” because they pay to get their message/story to the readership) accounts for 70-75 percent of all revenues. It is a powerful force and when a major advertiser complains, the head honchos listen … closely.
Sometimes the people at the corporate food chain buckle and sometimes they stand by their people. The latter is called integrity and conscience; the former is called pressure. An underling can be fired and never have done anything wrong or written anything false. It isn’t right but it happens … all the time!
Don Imus didn’t qualify under the umbrella of integrity. He went for a cheap laugh and it was disgusting. I’d merely ask all the fathers of girls if they thought it would be funny if their daughter was on that team.
Times have change and the degree of tolerance has also changed for our acceptance of mistakes. What was fine 30 years ago isn’t acceptable today – nor should it be.
We’d all be better off if more people with microphones and cameras took deeper breaths prior to speaking.