Imus in the Mourning
By Chad A. B. Wilson
Published April 14, 2007, 4:28 pm in News.
I often base my opinions on my outrage. I find myself beginning my columns with phrases like "What was X thinking?" And I wanted to begin this column that way. I can't let this Don Imus thing go without commenting on it, after all. If politics is all about power, and deciding who gets what, when, and where, then this Imus episode is completely political.
Let's examine it in relation to the question of power. It reveals something about the nature of our country.
Who has the power here? Don Imus thought he had the power. He thought he was impermeable, invincible, and that no one would question anything he said. He thought he had the power over the Rutgers women's basketball team, for one. Insults are meant to show that the insulted group is powerless. That's what racial slurs and stereotypes do, too. They demean the insulted one by showing how they are inferior. And inferiority is just another way to say "no power." So Imus thought he was the one in power, and he tried to assert his authority again and again, first through the racial insult and then through the way he tried to play it off as if he had not done anything.
Did the Rutgers girls have any power. Nope, not a lick. They're the one group with absolutely no power here. But it didn't really matter. Even though they could not act of their own accord, the people or groups with power acted on their behalf. This is hopefully the way it works. Those without power must be protected by those with power. It often doesn't work that way (see most racial relationships), but this is the ideal.
What about CBS? Sure, CBS has the final power here. They control whether Imus stays on the air or is fired. They can't keep him off the air forever, of course, for I'm sure some podunk station will pick him up without much ado. But CBS has the real power.
But what influences CBS? Money. That's what really controls everything. The investors, the advertisers, the people who decided that Imus was wrong, began to pull their money out of CBS. No more advertising revenue, then no more Imus. They can get someone else who will bring in advertising money.
But who controls the advertisers? What influences their decision to pull money out of CBS? You and I, the people who control the money that is spent buying the products those advertisers offer. Those companies had to decide whether they wanted to support racial slurs or not. What does it mean to them? Well, the slur was against black people, but it would also affect everyone else who was outraged by the comment. Keeping money in Imus's program would be tacit support for what he said. So anyone who didn't agree with what he said would be outraged by those companies, as well as by Imus. It makes the companies just as guilty, after all. If they don't pull out, the companies are acting as if it's okay, and even suggesting that they agree with him. So the people who are outraged would no longer want to buy their products.
So Imus lost every bit of power he had. CBS was no longer in control. The advertisers who paid CBS dictated whether Imus stayed in power or not, and the general public, the people who buy products from the advertisers, dictated what the advertisers should do. So who is really in power?
Us, the general public. We decided whether Imus should go or not. But that's maybe a bit too simplistic, anyway. In reality, money decided. What really holds power? The mighty greenback, the gold standard, the rin tin tin of booyah. The transfer of money and the threat of no transfer dictated all decisions in this instance. Who wielded it? The public. So the public put tacit pressure on the advertisers with the threat of money loss. The advertisers then pulled money away from CBS, and CBS, with the real loss of revenue, decided to can Imus.
That's the democracy of market capitalism right there, and it makes me proud to be an American. People always think that the general public has no pull over big business, but that's just not true. If we wanted to exert pressure on the biggest company, we could. If we all switched Linux operating systems, Microsoft would have to change strategies. If we stopped goingto Wal-Mart, things would change. It's like voting. One or two people or even a few thousand may not make that much difference in an election, but in the aggregate, the public makes all of the decisions. It works the same way with all aspects of capitalism. Sure, Wal-Mart has the best prices, but I know quite a lot of people who won't go there. Competition doesn't always mean sole undercutting of prices. It can also mean providing the best or the most reasonable services. Even though fiberglass insulation is dirt cheap, you won't see me putting it in my house. I go green, recyclable, even if it means I have to pay a little more for it. If everyone did that, we would see major changes.
Now it doesn't always work this way, unfortunately. I think about the film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and I think about how wrong the forces of market capitalism can go. Sometimes the corporations all get together and directly defy the will of the people. Even if the saying is "give the people what they want," that doesn't always happen. Perhaps all to often. But for the most part, this system works.
Here's the catch, though. It is difficult to get everyone to agree on action. Would people really have stopped going to Staples if Staples had not pulled out its advertising revenue? No, probably not. Sure, a few would, but most of us would not have even known Staples did advertise with Imus. So would it have made any difference? Maybe it wasn't the power of the green that motivated these companies, after all. Maybe, just maybe, it was altruism.
Nah, probably not.
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