Who is casting the first stone?
The public and market forces were enough to silence schlock-jock Don Imus after his racist and sexist remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team. So the federal regulatory attack proposed by the Seattle Times was not necessary, as ironic as it may have been.
The Times advocated having the Federal Communications Commission deny license renewal for the radio station that was home of the Imus program, based on racist or sexist humor, while acknowledging that his vile, coarse (the writer's terms) remarks "likely pass legal muster because they didn't include profanity or explicit sexual content." The newspaper also noted a pattern of hate speech.
Where is the irony in this? First of all, it is ironic that the editors propose using federal regulations to pull the plug on a competitor for the public's attention, when those regulations don't apply to the newspaper industry.
The next irony involves hate speech that has appeared on the Times' own Letters to the Editor page last month. The opinion editors grouped a number of anti-Semitic letters together last month in response to objections to the play "I am Rachel Corrie." These are similar to the charges that Henry Ford helped perpetuate when he published the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in the 1930s.
Let us explore the logic to this. It is OK for an unregulated newspaper to publish hate speech (as long as one of its readers penned the letter and not its editors) about a religious and ethnic group, but the federal government should shut down a radio station that couldn't pull the plug on an idiot who made vile remarks about another ethnic group?
Is one form of hate speech, applied to one ethnic group in print, any less hurtful than hate speech against another group on the public airwaves? Are their spokesman's concerns any different from the concerns (and outrage) the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson expressed after a radio talk-show host slurred African-American women?
(Well, in one way: No one called for the playwright to be denied the opportunity to earn a living, while the immediate reaction to the Rutgers remarks was to fire Imus.)
Should news media, which depends on the freedom of speech for its continued existence, propose to abridge it for another form of media? Unless two wrongs make a right, the answer is no.
And perhaps the rest of us who are glorifying in Don Imus getting his comeuppance should search our souls to see if we think - or say - equally hateful words.
John Livingston
Ravenna
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