As far I can tell this issue isn’t getting a whole lot of press outside the US, but here in the States one of the biggest stories in the past week or so has been the controversy over comments made by radio talk show host Don Imus about a women’s college basketball team and his subsequent firing by CBS and NBC.
As I’ve been observing the coverage of this story I’ve been feeling like I should write something about it, because it I’ve been mildly troubled by it – mainly because I think the issue is actually quite complicated, in ways that few people in the media seem willing to acknowledge. It seems to me that the very fact that there has been so much outrage about what Imus said has made it quite unsafe for people to ask serious and honest questions about the issue and that that has really stifled much real dialog.
It seems to me to be a case where the precisely correct way to interpret what happened and its relation to broader cultural issues is not completely obvious – it requires reflection, analysis, enquiry and dialog. It’s very hard to do that (in the public arena at least) when folks like Al Sharpton just (apparently) want people to know how angry they are and how angry any other morally upright person should be. It seems as if these people are unwilling to allow others to be genuinely uncertain about how to evaluate what happened.
I would love to write more about this and feel like I probably should, but I know I could spend hours on it that I just don’t have right now. However I will mention a pretty interesting discussion about this on MSNBC’s Meet The Press today (second half of the broadcast). I think this is the closest thing I’ve seen so far to a really constructive discussion, but even here it was interesting to see the difference in perspective of say David Brooks and Gwen Ifill – the latter seeing the issue in very back and white terms (I don’t mean in the racial sense) and seemingly quite irritated when Brooks suggested any ambiguity about the moral issues invovled.
I will also say that I think this is an example of an issue where I would love to see someone articulate a clear Christian perspective.