It's not just Imus

April 12, 2007
It's not just Imus

On April 11, NBC News announced that it was dropping MSNBC's simulcast of Imus in the Morning in the wake of the controversy that erupted over host Don Imus' reference to the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos." The following day, CBS president and CEO Leslie Moonves announced that CBS -- which owns both the radio station that broadcast Imus' program and Westwood One, which syndicated the program -- has fired Imus and would cease broadcasting his radio show. But as Media Matters for America has extensively documented, bigotry and hate speech targeting, among other characteristics, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity continue to permeate the airwaves through personalities such as Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson.

On the March 30 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, The Savage Nation, Michael Savage stated that he "agree[d] 100 percent" with a caller who said: "I'm very concerned that the Jews are now accepting gays as rabbis. And as a Catholic, I can tell you it almost destroyed our church when we accepted gays as priests." The caller added, "[T]hey were raping teenage boys, and if you allow them to come into your churches, I'm sorry, your synagogues, I have no reason to believe they're not going to do the same thing." Savage responded: "The idea of a gay rabbi is an oxymoron. Think about it: 'Rabbi' means teacher. You cannot have a homosexual teacher teaching boys how to be a Jew," adding, "I'm not going to mince words for fear of offending homosexuals. They're everywhere, anyway, trying to tell me what to say and what not to say and what to think. I know what's right and what's wrong. And that's all there is to it."