When Les Moonves, head of the CBS broadcasting network, finally fired the radio host Don Imus on Thursday evening for describing members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos", he expressed a pious wish.
"[ Mr Imus] has flourished in a culture that permits a certain level of objectionable expression that hurts and demeans a wide range of people. In taking him off the air, I believe we take an important and necessary step not just in solving a unique problem, but in changing that culture, which extends far beyond the walls of our company," said Mr Moonves.
We will see about that. Mr Moonves had little option but to get rid of Mr Imus, who emerged 25 years ago with Howard Stern as one of the original "shock jocks" of New York radio.
In his terse racial and sexual insult (the term literally means "black whores"), Mr Imus could hardly have picked on a less suitable target. The dignified and distressed reaction of the young players sealed his fate.
But there are plenty more where Mr Imus came from. He and Mr Stern spawned not only many radio imitators, but a secondary wave of polemical television hosts such as Bill O'Reilly and a tertiary one of bloggers and all-purpose outragers such as Ann Coulter, the rightwing author. The devotion of their fans - and the controversies they regularly stir up - have been highly profitable for companies such as CBS.
As the oldest of the bunch, 66-year-old Mr Imus knew how to roll with the punches. He had developed a wily manner that protected him for a long time, in spite of occasional racial blow-ups (he once described Gwen Ifill, a black political journalist as "the cleaning lady"). The Imus in the Morning show combined crude white middle-aged male vaudeville with sophisticated interviews.
Mr Imus cut a distinctive figure in the studio (his show was broadcast on both CBS Radio and the MSNBC cable television network, which also fired him).
Often wearing a cowboy hat - he owns a ranch in New Mexico - and surrounded by a claque of supporting voices such as Bernard McGuirk, his producer, he would ramble acidly about politics, sports and culture and then turn to a big-name guest.
And the names were big. Politicians such as the senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman appeared regularly because Mr Imus not only reached two million listeners and more than 300,000 viewers but he let them speak.
Instead of their words being cut into three-second soundbites for network news, they were allowed to talk at length and treated respectfully, if irreverently, by Mr Imus and his pals.
So the advertisers - big names such as Procter & Gamble and General Motors - backed Mr Imus and the careers of those linked with him flourished.
Mel Karmazin, who is now head of Sirius, the national satellite radio company, built Infinity Broadcasting, which merged with CBS in 1996, around Mr Stern and Mr Imus. Everyone awkwardly looked the other way or professed regret when Mr Imus strayed over the line.
As a result, his fatal stunt caused confusion, with politicians and media potentates such as Tim Russert, the Sunday television talk-show host, at first defending him as a good man who said a bad thing and then rapidly retreating as the depth of outrage became clear. The belated condemnation of Mr Imus by Barack Obama, the senator, was itself criticised as hypocritical.
The Imus implosion leaves a hole for Beltway insiders but how likely is it that it will also, as Mr Moonves suggested, mark a turning point in the tone of US cultural debate? Not very, I fear. Mr Imus was done for by a shift in the line of what epithets are tolerated. George Allen, the former Virginia senator, lost his seat in November after being filmed calling a man of Indian descent "macaca".
The ubiquity of modern media - and media monitoring - has also made life riskier. Just as Mr Allen was caught on tape, Mr Imus's aside, delivered at 6.15am on April 4th, was promptly transcribed by the leftwing internet site Media Matters for America, with a link to a video clip of the incident. That captured the attention of many people who would otherwise have slept obliviously through it.
But, while this may act as a curb, the cultural and commercial forces that gave birth to shock jocks have, if anything, intensified.
Culturally, the US is still sharply divided - between black and white, blue (liberal) and red (conservative), male and female. To counter rightwing demagogues such as Bill O'Reilly, the left now has its own polemicists, such as Keith Olbermann of MSNBC.
Meanwhile, the term "ho" is banded about by hip-hop artists who surpass Mr Imus in their offensiveness towards black women (a point Mr Imus made feebly in his defence). Snoop Dogg's retort that, unlike Mr Imus, "We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel" left a lot to be desired.
Nor is there any sign that shock jockery, blogging or book authorship has lost its commercial potential. The airwaves are more crowded than ever and a good way to stand out from the crowd is to be loud and provocative. By calling John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate, a "faggot" recently, Ms Coulter earned lots of opprobrium but kept herself firmly in the public mind.
So say farewell to Don Imus (until he re-emerges from the wilderness, perhaps on satellite radio). He was a shock jock, take him for all in all. We shall listen to his like again. - (Financial Times)
