WHY THEY WENT ON THE SHOW
This piece by Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the NY Times Book Review, is a window into the rationale for all those liberal pundits and politicians in the Beltway cool club who went on the Imus show all these years in spite of the vocal criticism of his slurs against gays, Jews, women, African-Americans and others. Tanenhaus admits that he harbored an opportunism to sell books (as Frank Rich admits in a more defensive and angry piece), was blinded by flattery when Imus lauded his work over and over again, and that he also felt a creepy kind of peer pressure -- a fear of being thought of as uncool (actually, Tanenhaus says "undemocratic") if one is not on board with laughing at racist (and other offensive) jokes in this culture:
Today, in the harsh light of Mr. Imus’s disgrace, it is hard to explain why none of this bothered me very much. But the truth is I tuned it out. One reason, I think, is that my position seemed paradoxical. I was pleased to have been admitted into Mr. Imus’s club — alongside famous columnists and TV pundits and celebrated authors.
But I also had been summoned into the exotic precinct of mass, or mob, culture, with its populism and prejudices, its bracing vulgarity, its base humor. And in America at least, all these characteristics are inseparable from broad popularity, the warts of our pluralism.
Those who stand outside it can seem undemocratic.
I think this tells us a lot about the motivations and actions (and inactions) of the Beltway/Big Media crowd, on a variety of issues beyond Imus.
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