Prometheus 6

If you WANT to believe Imus... 

Mr. Beschloss, who has had four books showcased on the Imus program over the last 10 years, was asked if, in deciding to go back on the show, he had felt any sense of indebtedness. “That’s just human nature,” he said. “Of course I do.”

But he also said he had been moved by Mr. Imus’s apologies in the days before his firing and his meeting with (and subsequent forgiveness by) the Rutgers team.

“The speed of this,” he said, “is really a response to the magnitude of the apology and the magnitude of the acceptance by the people who were offended.”

(Not being one of the offened, Beschloss is full of it.)

And there's a level where it's hysterically funny to see Skip Gates jacking Rev. Jackson and Edwards over a racial issue.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, said he viewed the fast track of Mr. Imus’s return as a sign of how “cash and marketplace trump race.”

“I’m troubled by the cynicism,” said Mr. Gates, who has never been an Imus guest. “Basically Imus has had a sabbatical. His remarks were the racist remarks of the month. Now it’s as if everyone has forgotten. Perhaps he has learned from his mistake.”

But Mr. Gates said that the responsibility for Mr. Imus’s rebound lay not just with the elites of white America, but with those in the black community who led the charge for his firing.

“People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were so vocal, and so triumphant in their moral victory,” he said. “Where are they now?”

All Forgiven, WIMUS-AM Is on a Roll
By JACQUES STEINBERG

IN the two months since his microphone was turned back on, Don Imus has hardly suffered for company.

Politicians like John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman and Bill Richardson have called him on the air to welcome him back and take his questions, as have Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and John McCain, who happily accepted Mr. Imus’s presidential endorsement.

Newsmen like Tim Russert, Bob Schieffer and George Stephanopoulos have submitted to interviews, too, along with the authors Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the columnists Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman and Frank Rich of The New York Times.

Each appeared with some regularity before Mr. Imus was fired in April over the racially and sexually disparaging remarks that he and a producer made about the Rutgers women’s college basketball team. And each has followed him to his new radio flagship (WABC-AM in New York) and to RFD-TV, the up-and-coming, rural-oriented television channel now simulcasting his program in place of MSNBC. 

The immediate imprimatur of such A-list guests is but one indication that Mr. Imus has emerged, seemingly clean and in many ways whole, from a wash cycle administered with breathtaking velocity both inside the Beltway and out. (One notable exception: he has yet to find a radio affiliate in Washington, D.C., where his show was once regarded as a virtual salon.) While it will be some time before Arbitron has calibrated how many listeners he has on the nearly 50 stations that do carry his show, many advertisers have seen little reason to wait. Bigelow Teas, Accountemps, NetJets, the Mohegan Sun casino, various car makers and a big New Jersey hospital are peddling their wares during his commercial breaks, at least in New York, just as they did before.