Don Imus and the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team
Kennedy School of Government C15‐08‐1920.0 Case Program Crossing the Line: Don Imus and the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team On April 4, 2007, in the early minutes of his morning radio talk show, host Don Imus jokingly remarked on the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, which had lost a national college championship game the previous night. Picking up on a comment by his producer and longtime sidekick, Bernard McGuirk, who had described the Rutgers players as “some hard‐core hos,” Imus said, “That’s some nappy‐headed hos there.” The remark was, wrote public television host Gwen Ifill, “a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult”—a “ho” was, in street argot, a whore, and “nappy‐headed” a derogatory allusion to the texture of African‐American hair— “tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle‐aged white men.” 1 This was by no means the first time Imus and the regulars on his show had inserted racial and sexual innuendo into their early morning banter. “Imus in the Morning” had long been, in the words of Newsweek, “a mix of the high‐minded and the profane,” 2 a show where serious conversations with prominent politicians and journalists alternated with what was often characterized as crass “locker‐room” humor. Over the years, Imus and his cohorts had directed gibes at homosexuals, blacks, Jews, and other ethnic minorities while poking fun at prominent figures in sports, entertainment, and politics. Occasionally, there was a public outcry over some of the more egregious insults, forcing Imus to defend himself against charges that he was a bigot; but eventually the uproar—which seldom made headlines—would die down, and Imus, whose popular four‐hour show was nationally syndicated through CBS Radio and simulcast on MSNBC‐ TV, ultimately emerged unscathed and unrepentant.
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