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Imus: I Can Make Comeback
For the first time in three decades, radio host Don Imus is without a show. He is optimistic -- perhaps overly so, given the commercial pressures that brought him down -- about the future. In an e-mail to Newsweek, Imus said, "I could go to work tomorrow. Bigger deal. More money. TV simulcast ... I've got a summer of kids to cowboy with and then we'll see." He knows what he said was wrong, and that there is much to do. Asked whether his recovery from addiction had given him the strength to cope with the current crisis, he sounded like, well, Imus: "I'm a good and decent person who made a mistake in the context of comedy," he wrote in the e-mail. "My strength comes from not being full of sh-- and a coward." Imus's comments are part of the April 23 Newsweek cover package, "Power, Race and Media" (on newsstands Monday, April 16) that examines the Imus episode of his use of a racist slur during his broadcast, the fallout and his firing. The package includes a report on the Rutgers women's basketball team and the meeting they held with Imus, and an essay by Contributing Editor Ellis Cose on what lessons the country has learned from the episode. Imus's wife, Deirdre, tells Newsweek that her husband will be back. "When he's in front of a microphone again, it will be about how to heal the issue of divisiveness and race. That is what's in his heart. No one else will conduct this conversation. No one else would talk about autism and Walter Reed." Young black journalists were among the first to demand that Imus be ousted. Thursday evening, one day after Imus's comments, Jemele Hill, an ESPN reporter, posted the Media Matters link on the National Association of Black Journalists' e-mail list. Greg Lee, a Boston Globe reporter, spotted it right away. "I couldn't believe Imus would pick on people he had no right to pick on," he tells Newsweek. Lee forwarded the story to other online forums. In a matter of hours, black journalists in newsrooms across the country were clicking on it, and getting angry. The next day, the NABJ
Story Continues Below demanded an apology from Imus, then called for him to be fired. Newsweek reports that after the networks suspended Imus, inside NBC, rank and file employees and reporters were growing impatient with what they considered foot-dragging. NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker heard from a subordinate about the growing uproar in NBC News, especially among black journalists, and knew immediately it was "obviously a huge problem and completely unacceptable," according to two people familiar with his thinking who did not want to be named discussing their boss. But the higher-ups still didn't understand just how big a problem they had, until complaints started rolling in from employees all over the company, USA Network and Telemundo, the film group in Hollywood, and NBC-owned-and-operated local stations around the country. NBC News president Steve Capus called for an extraordinary meeting of African-American employees on Tuesday, April 10. According to people who attended the meeting, but didn't want to be named discussing internal matters, weatherman Al Roker told Capus, "That could have been my daughter Imus was joking about." Others piled on. "I'm telling you, Capus got lobbied hard, really hard, and he really took it to heart," says an NBC News senior producer. "We went out and created diversity in our newsrooms and we empowered employees to say what they think. And they're telling us. It's good for us and it's good for the country." Also in the cover package, Assistant Editor Raina Kelley, National Sports Correspondent Mark Starr and Washington Correspondent Eve Conant report on Imus's meeting with the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Coach C. Vivian Stringer told Imus last Thursday that he had robbed her players of their triumphant moment. "I told Mr. Imus, 'I can't believe I even have to say the word 'ho'," Stringer tells Newsweek. During the meeting at the New Jersey governor's mansion, Imus seemed genuinely apologetic, asking for forgiveness and telling the players and their relatives -- about two dozen participants in all -- that making fun of people was just what he did. He insisted that he didn't mean to hurt anyone, according to someone who attended the meeting (but did not want to speak on the record because she was not authorized to disclose details). "We want to know the truth here, we want to know everything you are feeling," Imus said to the team, Deirdre Imus tells Newsweek. The Knights never called for the radio host's dismissal. They wanted both the world and Don Imus to know that they did not consider themselves helpless victims. For team captain Essence Carson, Imus's remark was more sexist than racist. "It was an attack on women first," Carson tells Newsweek. "He just made it race specific." Initially, the Knights wanted to ignore Imus and absorb their pain as a team, says Carson, but after a little discussion, the women decided they "had to take a stand." Stringer's example was key, she says; "Coach has been through everything you can think of, [so] we know we have the strength to bear anything." Editor's note:
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