Pulling the plug on Imus should be easy decision

Dollars and sense prevailed when simple common sense should have sufficed, but the end result is what matters most: fewer speakers across our nation will put out pollution from Don Imus.

If the people responsible for putting Imus on the air were really bothered by his reference to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” on his April 4 show, they wouldn’t have waited until the following week and a growing furor to condemn them. Their first response would have been more than a token two-week suspension and it wouldn’t have taken an exodus of advertisers for MSNBC to stop syndicating Imus’ radio show. I don’t know what CBS Radio is waiting for.

Imus should have been fired from the jump, not just because of these remarks but because his show has long been a safe haven for racist and sexist comments, and his continued employment would send a message that his bosses are fine with it.

If these comments weren’t such a part of the Imus persona, there wouldn’t be a section on his Wikipedia page headlined “Racism, misogyny and homophobia.” You don’t see that on, say, David Letterman’s entry.

But on Imus’ show it’s acceptable for journalist Gwen Ifill to be called a “cleaning lady.” Or for Venus and Serena Williams to be described as animals better suited for National Geographic than Playboy. Or for Imus to call the “Jewish management” (his description) at CBS Radio “money-grubbing bastards.”

Yet none of these prompted the giant media entities to undergo the soul-searching and policy revision brought on by Janet Jackson’s nipple.

Then Staples, Procter & Gamble, American Express and General Motors took a principled stand and pulled their advertising from Imus’ show. (I suddenly have an urge to drive a Cadillac to buy some office supplies, then pick up some Tide on the way home and put it all on a green credit card.)

MSNBC and CBS Radio should not have had to follow anyone else’s lead on this issue or be told what to do by any organization.

When former NBA player Tim Hardaway said he hated gay people in a radio interview, Commissioner David Stern quickly cut him off from league-related functions. After Albany Patroons Coach Micheal Ray Richardson rekindled stereotypes in describing his “crafty” “Jew lawyers,” his contract was not renewed by the Continental Basketball Assn. team. This week NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Pacman Jones for a year and Chris Henry for half a season because of the players’ lengthy list of legal troubles.

Those were all appropriate steps, sending a strong message that this behavior would not be tolerated. But the networks cared about the numbers, not the words. Imus draws 2.5 million radio listeners a week and reaches an additional 361,000 viewers while simulcast on MSNBC. Somehow he manages to build such a large audience without being interesting or entertaining. If he had anything more thoughtful to say, he wouldn’t need to stoop to such attention-grabbing gimmicks as calling Hillary Rodham Clinton “Satan” and saying she’s worse than Osama Bin Laden.

Watching Coach C. Vivian Stringer at the Rutgers news conference Tuesday, I thought, she should have a national radio show. If you saw her, how could you not be impressed by her eloquence and passion? She didn’t provide sound bites, just a steady stream of common sense as she described her personal, heartbreak-filled history and the tale of this Rutgers team that came together after a slow start and wound up competing in the NCAA championship game.

The players came off as quality people as well. It’s an indictment of all of us in the media that we didn’t talk about them before Imus, and it took his comments for them to get an hour of national TV time Tuesday.

That feeds into what a female friend furiously texted to me Tuesday, that this story is at least as much about sexism as it is about racism.

It is sexist that looks even came into play while talking about a sporting event. I didn’t hear any discussion of the attractiveness of the Florida or Ohio State players after the men’s championship game. Men still haven’t evolved past the point of asking a basic question whenever a woman is involved: Is she fine?

But historically, racism trumps sexism, and as soon as Imus invoked hair and “hos,” it became a racial issue. It was a way of casting these women as “other” or less, and providing an unfortunate reminder that we’ve allowed the term “ho” to become almost interchangeable with “black woman.”

Hopefully all the rappers who continually call women bitches and hos learned something from this as well: Their use of the terms pollutes the air and leads to these types of insults. One of the excuses trotted out by Imus and his defenders is that African Americans use these offensive terms all the time in hip hop and get away with it, so he was just using them too. That’s a pitiful card to play, because I’ve never heard a rapper use any of that language in specific reference to the Rutgers women’s basketball team. But why even give him an out?

Stringer wondered what our society is coming to when women are likened to prostitutes simply because they’re playing a championship basketball game. Are we really going to accept this? Keeping Imus employed would say that we are.

His defenders say he does a lot of charity work. In that case, he should have even more time to do it.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.