What Business Learned from the Firing of Don Imus

Volume 21 • Issue 3 April 19, 2007 What Business Learned from the Firing of Don Imus by David Zweig Editor’s Note: Until the Virginia Tech shootings, the spectacle of business’s reaction to Don Imus’s racist and misogynistic comments last week presented a rare opportunity for serious national dialogues about our values, our culture, and the choices we make — or evade — daily. Powerful executives had to make decisions that transcended their job titles, and went to a place they clearly did not visit enough: who they are as human beings. This account reflects my personal perspective and in no way reflects the opinion of the World Business Academy. From this vantage point, I wrote this piece to share the evidence that something remarkable occurred last week, and it portends, with hope, a signpost that business will never be quite the same again. N THE 21ST CENTURY, America’s news cycle never seems to move from I“spin” to “rinse.” Last week the nation was transfixed by the 10-day se- rial dismemberment of Don Imus’s broadcast career after his latest, but likely not his last, racist and misogynistic remarks were transmitted for profit over the public spectrum. Imus spent the week in abject contrition, apologizing to anyone who would listen, and many who would not: the Reverend Sharpton, the Rev- erend Soaries, his audience, the Rutgers President, the basketball play- ers… anyone. Imus is certainly no stranger to hot water. But this flap was different. When his deal finally went down it was not a matter of black and white. It was, in part, green: advertisers pulled out. But looking beneath the obvious, the incident reveals something new in the world of business: yes, the power of media has changed. But more importantly, we also saw a new need to accommodate employees as stakeholders, individual reflection by CEOs, an intelligent national discussion along moral lines, and, above all, a newfound ability to perceive that which always should have been obvious: in short, a higher consciousness. Fortuitously and fortunately for Imus, the incalculable human tragedy of Virginia Tech bumped his firing from the airwaves, the Internet, and the newspapers. This week’s double sequel, Groundhog Day: Bowling for Blacksburg, provides another snapshot of how little the tectonic plates of the gun business, politics and media have moved since two other adolescent loners shot up their Colorado High School eight years ago, almost to the day. The majority in Congress purposely pushed the assault rifle ban into oblivion in 2004. One of Cho Seung-Hui’s pistols held 33 rounds, enabling him to pump at least three shots into each of his 47 victims. At the risk of digression, I note that Larry Pratt, director of Gun Owners of America, said this week, “It is irresponsibly dangerous to tell citizens that they may not have guns at schools.” At the NRA convention last week, former Ambassador John Bolton described his efforts to weaken two UN Conferences aimed at restricting international gun trafficking. Bolton was joined on the podium by Oliver North, who is not without experience in such matters. As America’s fetish with its 200,000,000 firearms spirals us and the world toward greater insanity, the other side of the frenzied media diptych, the Imus episode, had begun every so briefly to draw business, media, and American society closer to the light. It engendered a thoughtful discussion, and not a spitball war of soundbytes and in- sults. People actually changed positions, and even vowed to change their policies, without resorting to the fulsome apologies that we hear almost daily in the media. 2 Whether businesses choose to traffic in armaments or hate speech, the rest of us suffer. One can extrapolate almost no wisdom from the isolat- ed act of a madman like Cho, and it is useless to think about his crime if the businessmen who make the guns, and politicians they own, refuse to do anything different. That reason alone should suffice to afford the victims’ families the grace in which they can grieve. The media’s obses- sion with these murders had another sad outcome that, unlike the kill- ings, did affect all of us: the media frenzy over this crime pre-empted a long overdue discussion about race, gender, and the allure of banal hate speech that passes as “entertainment” in our culture. If the gunmakers are inured from the threat of conscientious reflection about their contribution to society, perhaps the corporate advertisers who for so many decades underwrote Imus and his madcap hate speech are not. As much as anything, the Imus program highlighted a kind of willful macular degeneration of the consciousness of business, of the politicians who frequented his show, and, ultimately, of his audience. The selective blindness on the part of white America — the white politicians, white advertisers, white CEOs, and white network executives, the preponderance of whom happen to be male — was perhaps the most unsettling part of this incident. As long as Imus remained in his container, whose edges were scribed by our blindness, it was all right to pour millions into his coffers. Most reports suggest he earned $10 million annually. The neurophysiologist Jerome Lettvin wrote a famous paper called What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain wherein we learned that, gener- ally, members of one species see things differently from members of others. He monitored activity in frogs’ optic nerves while showing them visual stimuli. Frogs can see four things: general environmental outlines (useful for amphibians), small dark objects (like bugs), sudden changes in light and dark from above (like a bird-predator), and moving edges. Americans and frogs are vertebrates with similar image processing hard- ware. But in the case of Don Imus, unlike frogs, we cannot see moving edges. As the shock-jock plied his trade through the decades, most of us didn’t see how he regularly trespassed the bounds of taste, civility, and humanity. The listeners didn’t see it. The advertisers didn’t. The media execs didn’t. The politicians and guest wise men on his show didn’t see it. Only his victims saw it. We couldn’t even conjure up the victims’ faces in our minds until they paraded their pain on national television. In the case of Don Imus, the frog had it all over us. What was it about this issue, this man, and his competitors — who still pass off hatred, anger, and degradation as acceptable political com- mentary or entertainment — that blinds us? Why did it take us so long 3 to determine that Imus, despite his charitable fundraisers and chil- dren’s camps, had irretrievably crossed the line? Imus had crossed the line many times. But in every instance, most of us, even our best and brightest, unconsciously chose not to see him wandering where he did not belong. Every elevation in individual human consciousness is presaged by a shift in perception. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ And Vanity comes along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But Conscience asks the question ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Con- science tells him it is right.” As I scan the approved public statements of media executives and cor- porations, with scant exceptions white America dithered on the Imus matter. It is difficult to find someone early on who said, “This is beyond the pale. We’re pulling our business forever.” In a rare exception, CBS benefited from diversity of one of its board directors, Bruce Gordon. A former Verizon executive and briefly the head of the NAACP, he called CEO Les Moonves and told him in no un- conditional terms to fire Don Imus. The value of diversity here does not reside in the hue of Gordon’s skin (although he happens to be the only CBS director from a minority group), which is irrelevant. Rather, Gordon adds value because he perceived things differently from the other people at the board table (who happen to be white). Unlike his colleagues, he saw the question in unambiguous terms with sharp edges: As an African-American, I believe that Imus has crossed the line, a very bright line that divides our country. His remarks are so significant that I believe that the right outcome is for him to be terminated. [The two-week suspension] affords management the opportunity to do due diligence and evaluate what this means to the company, the brand and what it stands for. Once due diligence is completed, it is my belief that the facts should determine that he should be terminated. We should have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to what I see as irresponsible, racist behavior. The Imus comments go beyond humor. Maybe he thought it was funny, but that’s not what occurred. There has to be a consequence for that behavior. When I look at it from my position as a director, where my responsibility is to repre- sent the best interest of the shareholders, it’s more complex. But at the end of the day, the image of CBS is at risk...the ad revenue of CBS could be at risk. What I expect is for management to take the next 4 two weeks to do their homework. I hope that the result of their due diligence is to terminate Don Imus.

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