Short and Sweet on Imus

It's hard to make an argument that Don Imus's trade has represented the best of American culture. If Imus is the pinnacle of American culture, we should withdraw our troops from everywhere in the world and completely dismantle our military and national defense infrastructure, because America is no longer worth defending.

However, while not defending Imus's racist/sexist history or arguing that it represents the best of America, some have still tried to say that America is still best served by allowing such voices to be heard, rather than muzzling them. Michael Meyers wrote an op-ed in the WP the other day that made this exact argument. Predictably, Meyers made the issue a conflict between those who love free speech and 'censorious' activists. My take:

Michael Meyers is greatly distorting the free speech debate in his defense of Don Imus' speech rights. Meyers considers the desire of citizens to see Imus fired for his racist remarks 'censorious' and an affront to the First Amendment. This is grossly incorrect. The First Amendment guarantees the right to be able to say what we want as citizens. But it does not guarantee the right to an audience. Nor does it guarantee the right to have a lucrative book deal, newspaper column, successful movie or album sales, or in Imus's case, a syndicated radio and TV show as a vehicle to propagate one's views. Put simply, the First Amendment does not guarantee free speech without consequence. Citizens who are demanding Imus' firing are doing nothing more than properly exercising their own First Amendment rights. Those like Meyers who refuse to defend the speech rights of the citizenry with the same vigor in which they defend the speech rights of Imus are no friends of the First Amendment, particularly when their defense of Imus involves making the First Amendment say what it doesn't say.

I am deliberately not getting into the fray of whether Imus was unfairly singled out given the commonness of the racist slang he used in certain other parts of the entertainment culture. That's an important issue and one that should be vetted with care and intellectual sobriety. I am also not commenting here on the very cynical mea culpas issued by his former corporate handlers. I've commented on another forum that Imus will now have the fitting punishment of pondering the degree to which he was a complete dolt at the hands of MSNBC and CBS who fired him for doing exactly what they encouraged him to do, and knew that their relationship with him would probably come to this sooner or later. My chief burden here is to strongly distinguish between the right of free speech, versus the alleged right to lucrative avenues to disseminate one's speech. The former is more or less guaranteed, the latter is not. It is increasingly popular to lump them together in order to immune controversial people from market-driven consequences. But it is an illegitimate combination; completely illegitimate.