Karl Vincent Frisch

Richmond Times Dispatch

VCU professor suggests everyone could use dose of the Golden Rule

By Julian Walker

This is not a story about Don Imus.

He’s just the latest public figure to step on his lip.

Last week’s verbal assault on the Rutgers University women’s basketball team gained Imus a two-week radio suspension and a date with the team to explain himself. Meanwhile, the TV network MSNBC announced it was completely dropping its simulcast of the show.

This is a story about folks who inadvertently say one or two words too many, forget about other’s feelings or feel empowered to say anything they want.

Public figures - black and white, famous and inconsequential - have said the same kinds of things in public before and have drawn a similar stinging backlash.

Former Republican U.S. Sen. George Allen, conservative commentator Ann Coulter, current U.S. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., actor Michael Richards and the Rev. Jesse Jackson are among that crew.

In a politically correct world with 24-hour news and technology tools that can preserve for posterity - or some scandal to be named later - unfortunate episodes of foot-in-mouth disease can, and sometimes do, cause a furor.

“Fifteen years ago, it would have died a slow death and no one would have known it happened,” said Karl Frisch, spokesman for Media Matters for America, which was among the first to draw attention to Imus’ remarks on its Web site.

“Now we can get it going on the Internet and get it going to the blogosphere and reporters that cover that type of issue and that makes it impossible for things to die … Justifiable outrage [and] righteous indignation is something that cannot be ignored anymore”

Media Matters is a Washington-based progressive nonprofit organization that tracks print and broadcast media coverage and some of the industry’s more prominent conservative talking heads such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly.

The conservative nonprofit media watchdog group Media Research Center in Alexandria has also been following the flap.

“What technology does is it gives you a smorgasbord of things to be outraged about,” explained center research director Rich Noyes. “There’s far more [available] video and far more outrageous quotes for people to chose to get outraged about then they could have 25 years ago, and it makes stories like this all the more selective…. Technology also has the effect of allowing people to pick and choose what they’re going to be outraged about.”

Responding to a question about what is appropriate speech in the current politically correct climate, Noyes summed it up this way: “You can say anything your audience and your employer will let you say.”

What your employer will let you say depends on whom you write for, according to Richard Karpel, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, a trade group representing 125 newspapers in North America.

“The difference is the audience,” he said. “Daily newspapers and other mainstream media are looking to attract a huge market, whereas we’re more niche publications so we’ve never been too concerned about offending people. In fact, a lot of the papers in our organization would feel they weren’t doing their jobs if they didn’t offend people.

“Some of our readers love to pick up the paper and get offended … and they can’t wait to pick up the paper next week and get offended … again,” Karpel continued. “If it’s the truth and people need to hear it, the fact that it’s not politically correct shouldn’t influence a newspaper on whether they should publish it or not … In other words, PC culture is in the eye of the beholder.”

Clarence W. Thomas, an associate professor of electronic media and broadcast history at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Mass Communications, defines political correctness as language that shows respect to those being spoken to.

“It’s almost like the Golden Rule,” he said. “I don’t see anything wrong with the notion of political correctness because I see it facilitating the process of positive social interaction within our society.”

Thomas theorizes that Imus made his remarks because he had heard others say similar things.

“When things end up in popular culture people think it’s OK to say,” he continued. “Thus, you end up with statements like ‘nappy headed hos.’ That wouldn’t be in the lexicon if it was not already in popular culture.”

And therein lies the root of the problem, according to Bishop Jerald Cuff, pastor of Word of God Church at 600 Upham Drive in Henrico County.

“Has anyone considered addressing the vulgarity and use of the same language that has now got everybody inflamed on our local rap radio stations. I would assume that this is not tolerated in anybody’s community if it’s not tolerated on the national level. And if it’s being tolerated here, why isn’t anybody doing anything about it?”

Count King Salim Khalfani, executive director of Virginia State Conference of the NAACP, as someone who agrees with those sentiments.

“Not only is Don Imus wrong … but [so are] those who are artists of any kind who use degrading and animalistic terms for women and use the ‘N’-word. All of that foolishness needs to stop,” he said at a news conference yesterday.

Ray Shaw, of Richmond who goes by the name DJ RNS when he’s spinning hip-hop records on his Tuesday night XM Satellite Radio show, said rap music isn’t the only place objectionable words are used.

“Anytime something like this occurs, hip-hop always get the raw deal of it,” he said of links between the Imus comments and rap lyrics. “In a sense they’re right. It’s not fair for the hip-hop and rap community to talk that way. But it’s not just hip-hop. It’s in the movies. It’s on TV. It’s the media in general. In movies and other types of music women get degraded, but no one seems to bring that up.”

Melody Drnach, vice president of action for the National Organization for Woman, said Imus’ remarks go beyond debates about political correctness.

“This was racist and sexist … and abhorrent all the way around,” she said.

Donelson R. Forsyth, a professor at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies, agrees with that assessment, noting that “individuals who feel they are special in some way often feel as if their special privileges give them the right to do things others cannot.”

“It may be that Imus believes that his years of work in journalism gives him special rights that others don’t have; idiosyncrasy credits, as they are sometimes called,” Forsyth added. “Such people, however, can find that they have bankrupted their credit when they go across the line of what is considered allowable. In such cases, those with high status are likely to be punished more directly and substantially than those who are of less renown.”

And while the rebuke of Imus is proper, Noyes said, political correctness has some drawbacks.

“It probably has substituted for having a real discussion or a real debate. It’s had a chilling effect to some extent…. I think there are no standards. It can be enforced at any time, but it can also be ignored at any time. It’s thoroughly at the whim of what else is going on in the world and what the media wants to talk about.”