Murdoch! Murdoch! Nightmare of Murdoch!

On July 31, after months of negotiation and great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the American press, Keith Rupert Murdoch, legendary boardroom buccaneer and king of tabloid journalism, completed acquisition of The Wall Street Journal, the crown jewel of his News Corporation media empire, for $5 billion – on a per share basis, a handsome runup in the value of the shares of Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company.

The new boss celebrated his latest acquisition with execs and advisers at News Corp. headquarters in Manhattan by breaking out bottles of Australian Shiraz, a fine full-bodied red-wine narcotic. His employees no doubt used something stronger; Oxy-Contin might not even be enough. There’s been great trepidation on the part of Journal staff; resumes have reportedly been in circulation for weeks, if not months. But with the deal done, Murdoch has exercised his right to tweak that famous excerpt from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita:

“Now I am become Owner, destroyer of standards and reputations.”

From now until the deal is fully consummated, probably some time in early October, the mouthpieces of the media will be circling the wagons and calling their bookies to place bets on how this most prestigious American newspaper will be transformed. If past is prologue, and it often is, the signs are not good.

The cognoscenti of the press wasted no time in discussing the issue. On PBS’s “Charlie Rose,” Ken Auletta, media columnist for The New Yorker, told Rose that the acquisition “gives him enormous power, enormous clout. The Journal will set an agenda the way the [News Corp.-owned] New York Post cannot.” Some of that clout will be evident when Murdoch’s Fox News Business Channel launches, with the assets and resources of the Journal, in more than 31 million homes, on October 15.

Much of the delay in the acquisition was a result of protracted discussions within the Bancroft family, previously the owners of Dow Jones and a clan Auletta told Rose was “as dysfunctional as Paris Hilton’s family.” The battlin' Bancrofts dithered and pulled their chins about selling the Journal for months, with some in the family sincerely expressing reluctance to sell based on principles of Journalistic Integrity and Editorial Independence.

But Andrew Ross Sorkin, a brilliant New York Times business reporter, made a telling point on the Charlie Rose program, one that’s largely flown under the media radar: That, after all the breast-beating from the Bancrofts about maintaining credibility and upholding the Journal’s values and traditions, it all came down to chump change – a relatively small amount of money, given the Bancrofts’ already formidable resources.

Sorkin: “On Sunday night the Denver trust [of the Bancroft family], which was the last holdout trust said, ‘you know what? We want more than sixty bucks. You gotta give us more than sixty bucks. And Rupert’s team said, ‘no, we’re not giving you anything more , and that’s it, and we’re gonna walk and that’s the game.’ And [the Bancrofts] said, ‘well … would you think about paying our bankers and advisory fees?’ … In the end, that’s what put him over the goal line. Forty million dollars!”

The crafty Australian-born magnate was apparently smart to make an offer for Dow Jones north of its market worth right from the start. Murdoch’s $5 billion bid valued each Dow Jones share at $60, well above its trading range in the thirties earlier in the year. Thus, Murdoch froze out the competition. For good.


“You’d think everybody and their brother would want to own the Wall Street Journal,” Sorkin said. “Well, everybody and their brother does want to own the Wall Street Journal, but not at 60 dollars a share. … The idea of not accepting the bid – just think of what would happen: the shares would go down, management would freak out, the staff would be in turmoil and … we would be talking about this for the next two years and Rupert would be back and buying it at half the price. If you think this was a distraction, having said ‘no’ would be worse.”

Meanwhile, concerns about the future of the Journal continue among professional journalists. In today’s Boston Phoenix, for example, Adam Reilly recounts how Murdoch and his minions transformed the Boston Herald, which Murdoch acquired in late 1982:

“Step One was changing the layout from four columns to seven -- better for packing the pages with short, easy-to-read stories. Step Two was changing the paper’s ethos, from the subdued tabloid style cultivated under Hearst to something more authentically Murdochian -- edgy, sensationalistic, and shameless.”

Reilly relates that Les Hinton, an Australian who was assigned to be the Herald’s new managing editor, told another editor that “every page should look like it’s having a nervous breakdown.”

If that’s in any way the marching order for the new Journal, we can kiss any enduring sense of its journalistic gravitas goodbye. There’s a new sheriff in charge at Wall Street’s paper of record.

"I may be evil," Rupert Murdoch said, "but I'm not Pol Pot evil." Lord help us all.
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Image credit: Michael Albov, used under terms of Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license; WSJ logo ©2007 Dow Jones

Tube roses & thorns IV

Buyer’s remorse

Television is often the great distorter. It’s been said, for example, that people look ten pounds heavier on TV than they really are. The medium’s ability to convey unmerited gravitas extends to some of the hardball political punditocracy that makes up the landscape of cable; many of these “analysts” get credit for substance that they haven't earned.

But for all of television’s ability to throw shadows and fiction, it often reveals the truth. That’s nowhere more obvious lately than when watching the face and demeanor of Katie Couric, anchor of the CBS Evening News.

Simply put, folks, Katie ain’t happy now, and hasn’t been for some time. Her on-air demeanor has become almost painfully professional, direct and, in some cases, so automatic as to suggest she’s become the kind of rote newsreader she’s never been in recent years.

Remember, this was the Katie Couric who swept into the CBS Broadcast Center in September 2006 with the self-created mandate to do nothing less than Change the Face of Broadcast Television News. This was the Katie whose effervescent personality kept her aloft (and got us awake) for countless mornings on NBC’s “Today” show.

Couric started at CBS in the frothy wake of the Dan Rather scandal. When Rather stepped down under a cloud in March 2005, it was thought that whoever formally, officially succeeded Rather would have to be an improvement. Couric’s ascension to the top spot was just that, for a while.

In the beginning, Couric brought a lighter touch to CBS, running more than a few stories on celebrities and the wider culture in places where the body counts probably should have been. (Her on-air role had a parallel in the gossip magazines; the magazines you see at the end of the supermarket checkout counter published numerous stories about the unattached Couric stepping out with one wealthy beau or another – the network news anchor as frisky horndog.)

Purists accustomed to a straight-up, no-nonsense news format were not amused. After some new ideas on story choice and presentation failed to catch fire, the CBS program was revamped under veteran producer Rick Kaplan, late of CNN and MSNBC. But a number of reporting gaffes, and a proven claim of plaigiarism related to one of her Weblogs, have complicated the drive for legitimacy and acceptance by viewers, critics and news professionals.

CBS was, and remains, a distant third behind ABC's "World News" and "NBC Nightly News." The Sad Katie era has begun; you can see it in the latest network promos: Couric sits at her desk moving paper, head down, her blank expression hinting at a search for the exits.

Now, it’s getting ugly. A Couric interview in the July 9th issue of New York magazine has revived curiosity about her future at the Tiffany network.

Couric reportedly slapped a CBS News editor repeatedly in a tense newsroom confrontation, according to a source quoted in the New York article. Couric became angry over the word "sputum" into a story about tuberculosis last month. "I sort of slapped him around," Couric admitted to the magazine. "I got mad at him and said, 'You can't do this to me. You have to tell me when you're going to use a word like that.' I was aggravated, there's no question about that."

“Sputum” is the least of her concerns; right now Couric is chafing against Kaplan’s return to the buttoned-up style of Cronkite, Bob Schieffer (who temped in Katie’s role for months after Rathergate) and even, God help us, Dan Rather.

"People are very unforgiving and very resistant to change," Couric told New York. "The biggest mistake we made is we tried new things."

"If it turns out it wasn't a perfect fit (at the evening news), then, you know, I'll do something else that's really exciting and fulfilling for me," she told the magazine.

But not so fast. CBS News president Sean McManus may have other ideas.

"She has a five-year contract with CBS to anchor the evening news," McManus told The Associated Press on July 12. "All of us, including Katie, expect her to be anchoring the evening news in her fifth year."

Maybe Katie Couric’s getting the same slightly sinking feeling people sometimes have after making a major purchase, the voice in the back of the head that suggests they’ve made a serious mistake. But it’s too soon in the process for her or CBS to have buyer’s remorse. The checks she’s cashing are too big, and for CBS, still an also-ran in the ratings sweepstakes, the stakes are too high.

When the Couric era at CBS began, several “Evening News” promo spots made clever use of the phrase “See It Now,” borrowed from the program created by CBS icon Edward R. Murrow in the 1950’s. What remains to be seen is whether Couric and her bosses at the third-place CBS “Evening News” can make peace – the better to make sure anyone sees it at all.

Cup o’ Joe

Faring better, at least for now, is Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country” and more recently the host of “Morning Joe,” an early-morning news and commentary program mounted in the wake of the Don Imus debacle.

Scarborough sits on the same set of the Secaucus, N.J. studio that Imus once occupied, and the loose, freewheeling format is much the same as under Imus. Scarborough has two apparently permanent guest associates: John Ridley, novelist, screenwriter and essayist; Willie Geist, co-host of MSNBC’s lamentable “Tucker” program; and Mika Brzezinski, MSNBC news reporter and daughter of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

But the big change between Imus and Scarborough is really in some of the supporting cast: Ridley is African American, Brzezinski is a woman. Those facts right there are a big distinction from the days of Imus, whose virulent, white-guy-under-siege, red-meat testosterone aspect finally got him fired [see “Imus in the mourning”].

Here’s hoping Scarborough, whom The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz recently called a "recovering Republican politician," can keep carving out a niche in the mornings at MSNBC, whose ratings don’t exactly set the cable world on fire (the network trails CNN in prime-time viewers, as it has for years). The “Morning Joe” program may just be an experiment, but considering what it replaces, it’s one worth sticking with for now.
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Image credit: Couric: Nikki Webber Moore, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license; Scarborough: U.S. Government (public domain)

A dynamic duo in the works?

MSNBC reports today what Democratic insiders have been quietly saying among themselves for some time: that the populist and fundraising groundwork may already be laid for the viability of a Hillary Rodham Clinton-Barack Obama ticket in 2008.

That very real possibility calls for a re-examination of race, politics and the politics of race – it even calls for a different way of looking at what we think “electability” really is.

Obama’s campaign has consistently outpointed Clinton’s on the money front; yesterday it was announced that Obama had raised $34 million in the second quarter of the year alone, besting Clinton’s efforts by a mil or so. But despite revealing both a proven fundraising prowess and a charisma sorely lacking in much of the rest of the Democratic field, Obama remains subject to the chin-pulling and skepticism of Americans who knock Obama for not being Electable – Americans whose premise of Electability invariably hinges on perspectives of race [see “Barack Obama and the E-Word”}.

For them there’s a cheap safe harbor in that 64-Cent Question: “Is America ready for a black president?”

The prospect of Obama joining a Clinton ticket doesn’t eliminate the question; it shifts that reflexive skepticism to the top of the ticket; many of the same Americans uncomfortable with the idea of Obama as president are asking “Is America ready for a woman president?”



So the combination of the two could mean an unstoppable election juggernaut, not one animated by the conclusions of focus groups and professional pols, but one powered by its own status as The American Constituency. Women and minorities are in themselves a formidable percentage of the electorate; a Clinton-Obama ticket solidifies that potential, gives voters an impressive vision of the possible to get their minds around.

One matter up for discussion, though, is: Why not the other way around? With Obama’s record-setting fundraising (much of it done online) a proven ability to connect viscerally with his audience, and a relative absence of political baggage, why not Obama-Clinton in 2008?

This is the hurdle a lot of Americans would rather not be asked to get over: the idea of unambiguously supporting a black man in his quest for the most powerful job in the world. American history is littered with the agonies of our peculiar racial relationship; the idea of being confronted with the prospect of (at least) political equality as a consequence of national events is something many Americans can’t endorse. Yet, anyway.

The arithmetic of all this has yet to play itself out in this front-loaded campaign. With at least a dozen states set to have their primaries over and done with by the spring of 2008, we may have an answer sooner than later. But as Americans’ frustration with the Republican leadership gets worse, as the national complexion gets darker and more multicultural and more estrogen-rich, that 64-Cent Question yields a better one:

A black or a woman president – Is America really ready for anything else?

Grover's Independence Day

Mike Hargrove, the manager of the Seattle Mariners, took a page from the playbook of other figures in pro sports who went out on top. Hargrove, whose team is riding a wave in the AL West, announced yesterday that he would resign as Mariners skipper, effectively more or less immediately. Bench coach John McLaren takes over, making his first appearance as a manager since 1985, when he was with Knoxville of the Southern League.

Dudley Michael Hargrove thus becomes the first manager since 1900 to quit while on a winning streak of more than seven games, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

“It’s not the front office, it’s not a problem with a contract,” Hargrove said at a press conference with phrases meant to quell suspicion. “It’s where I’m at in life. I’m 57 years old. I’ve got my health. I’ve got a great family. It’s time.”

“I’ve daily challenged my players to give me the best that they’ve got, 100 percent of what they’ve got that day — physically and mentally. And they’ve done that. Without fail, they’ve done that," said Hargrove, whose Mariners won their eighth straight game yesterday, after he formally hung 'em up. The team is 12 games over .500.

“I have never had to work at getting that level myself — ever — until recently. I’ve found that I’ve had to work harder in making that same commitment to my bosses, to my players and to my coaches. And that’s not right,” Hargrove said, turning away and battling back tears.

“They deserve better. They are good people. There is a good thing going on here. And it’s time for me to leave.”

His wife Sharon, who also attended the presser, was equally eloquent, just as heartfelt in her celebration of Hargrove’s decision. “We’ve been married for 37 years. Gone together since junior high,” she said, choking off her own tears. “He’s slept in his own bed four days in eight months. I don’t know too many people who would sign up for that. And he’s done that for 35 years.”

You’d have to be made of stone not to see the sincerity in their comments. Professional sports skeptics will weigh in, looking for the deeper front-office motives behind a manager’s sudden decision to hang ‘em up when the team is on a serious winning streak. Some have said that Hargrove somehow ran afoul of nearly-free agent Ichiro Suzuki, the Mariners’ star player, or that the front office got tired of falling short of late-season divisional wins season after season. Or that, after 35 years, the wife put her foot down.

But it’s just as easy to come to the conclusion that Hargrove – "Grover" to legions of his Mariners fans – was only being honest. There’s been something evident in his body language all season long that suggested disquiet. After wins and losses alike, Hargrove sat at press conferences with a hangdog demeanor, eyes down in a weary stoicism, the countenance of a man tired of getting on and off planes and living in hotel rooms, a man exhausted by the exhaustion in his partner’s eyes.

And today the last shoe dropped. Grover made his announcement before the Fourth of July, but this was his Independence Day. And don’t look for Hargrove to turn into an AARP poster child for midlife crisis: He and Sharon already have fireworks of their own planned. They’re hitting the road, driving down the Pacific Coast in a new, red pickup truck they've either bought or will buy by time you read this. First it's off to see their son Andy, who plays for the Seattle farm club in Adelanto, Calif. From there it’s on to a little hideaway in New Mexico. Somewhere where Grover can finish the beard he already started early in the season, and draw flies for a while … real ones, not those popped up to the outfield. The real thing.

Good for you, Grover. Life’s too short not to be about the real thing. Whatever your real thing may be.
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Image credit: MyName (permission to use granted under GNU Free Documentation License, v1.2)

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, celebrated writer and bipedally-locomotive carbon-based terrestrial life form, fell recently and suffered brain injuries at his home in Manhattan. He died. He was 84. The moral and spiritual impoverishment of our times has increased exponentially. So it goes.

An author whose vision of our world and its people was by turns profoundly pessimistic and profoundly upbeat, Vonnegut brought us a mordant wit wrapped around an irrepressible moral vision. His fascination with science fiction underscored what seemed to be a deeply-held desire for escape from this earthly plane, flight from the charnel house of modern times -- a wish, couched in dark humor, one-liners and philosophical asides, to be anywhere else ... anywhere but here and now.

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Some of his novels, "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" in particular, were personal points of reference for college students in the 1960's and 1970's. For years you were guaranteed to find copies of those works and others at college bookstores and on plywood-and-cinderblock shelves in university dorm rooms across the country — a kind of red badge of undergraduate rebellion.

Vonnegut became something of a literary icon, one adored by students and the left. His very appearance -- bushy hair, tweed jacket, the obligatory Pall Mall cigarettes he favored -- suggesting a renegade college professor straight out of central casting.

Vonnegut came by his pessimism honestly. What may have been the definitive experience of his life was a defining moment for humanity as well. The firebombing of Dresden, Germany by British and American forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned alive or asphyxiated by the firestorm that consumed the oxygen in the air.

"The firebombing of Dresden was a work of art … a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany," he wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage."

"The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified."

That experience formed the backdrop of "Slaughterhouse-Five,"published in 1969 during the height of the Vietnam War, another indifferent conflagration.

In “Kurt Vonnegut’s Fantastic Faces,” a 1999 essay reprinted on the apparently official Vonnegut Web site, Peter Reed explains the way Vonnegut used sci-fi as a way into our rather more pedestrian world:

“Vonnegut has typically used science fiction to characterize the world and the nature of existence as he experiences them. His chaotic fictional universe abounds in wonder, coincidence, randomness and irrationality. Science fiction helps lend form to the presentation of this world view without imposing a falsifying causality upon it. In his vision, the fantastic offers perception into the quotidian, rather than escape from it."

Tom, a reviewer for Amazon.com, writing from Palatine, Ill., observed that "Vonnegut has a way of combining Orwell's eye with Updike's wit, and the sum is greater still, than the parts."

One of his oft-used visual symbols, what appears to be an asterisk, has done double-duty for years: It could be an anal sphincter. It could be a star in a distant galaxy. In the hands of Vonnegut the graphic artist, it could go either way, a symbol of our highest cosmic aspirations or a symbol of humanity at its most banal.

Despite writing celebrated novels that dwelt on the earthiest aspects of humanity, Vonnegut looked up in the night sky of his life and saw more than pinpricks of light. In a brief appearance in a 2002 film, for example, he said that "music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference."

That was Vonnegut, all right: the spiritual mixed in with the humorist with a fatalist streak. "I've had a hell of a good time," Vonnegut once wrote. "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different."

In his 1965 novel, "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," Vonnegut offered a philosophy strong enough to have been his valedictory if he’d stopped writing then. Written in the language of a greeting to newborns, it’s a philosophy that we, today, in a world more fractious and divisive and threatened than ever before, would do well to tell our children, our neighbors, ourselves, from now until the end of time:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' "
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Image credits: Vonnegut: ©2004 Mike Sands. Cat’s Cradle cover: © 1963 Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Imus in the mourning

Rage is a strange and powerful thing. It leads men to temptation, it makes allowances for trespass and brooks no forgiveness for those who trespass against us. It leads us to turbulent waters, clouds the judgment and the heart, and makes people see things that aren't really there. Rage reveals both folly and tragedy in pretty much equal measure; it's fundamental to the national conversation, and if you choose to ignore it, you do so at your own peril.

In the stark Fitzgerald's 3 a.m. of his soul, if he were honest about it, George Bush would tell you this.

So would John Donald Imus.

Imus, the 67-year-old legendary radio personality, noisy scold, tireless social commentator and iconoclastic firebrand, has made a career of outrage and impatience and a certain willingness to take shots at people whether they deserve it or not.

It's all made for a rabidly loyal following of fans -- listeners to his radio shows on WNYC and, more recently, WFAN Radio; public figures at every level, including politicians, authors and musicians; and most recently viewers of "Imus in the Morning," a cable TV-simulcast version of his WFAN radio show broadcast by MSNBC from their studios in Secaucus, N.J.

In a sports segment on April 4, at 6:14 a.m. local time, talk between Imus and his broadcast partners turned to the NCAA women's basketball game between Rutgers University and Tennessee.

"That's some rough girls from Rutgers," Imus cracked. "Man, they've got tattoos and ... " At that point Bernie McGuirk, Imus's longtime friend and producer, jumped in. "Some hard-core hos," he said. Imus, laughing, pressed further. "That's some nappy-headed hos there, I'm going to tell you that now," he said. Belly laughs all around. After a few more ugly jibes, they were on to the next thing.

Unspoken, for the most part, was the fact that April 4 was the 39th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.

The shitstorm of protest started early and seriously. The Imus exchange was noted by a sharp researcher at Media Matters for America, the Washington-based media watchdog group. Then the head of the National Association of Black Journalists called for his ouster. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton weighed in (a little automatically but necessarily, too).

And just that fast, the bigger shoes dropped. By April 6, the advertisers began to bail from both CBS Radio and MSNBC. Sprint Nextel, Staples, Ditech, GlaxoSmithKline, General Motors, Procter & Gamble and other deep-pocketed heavy hitters threatened to jump ship; in the minds of many, that prospective desertion by advertisers sounded the death knell for the Imus program as much as any lapse of ethics or social judgment.

In an attempt at damage control, on April 9: Imus said "Want to take a moment to apologize for an insensitive and ill-conceived remark we made the other morning regarding the Rutgers women's basketball team.

It was completely inappropriate, and we can understand why people were offended. Our characterization was thoughtless and stupid, and we are sorry."

Note the liberal exercise of the Royal 'We," a transparent attempt, some said, at deflecting the criticism beyond the person responsible: Imus himself.

Then came other damage control: MSNBC released a statement the same day: "While simulcast by MSNBC, 'Imus in the Morning' is not a production of the cable network and is produced by WFAN Radio. As Imus makes clear every day, his views are not those of MSNBC. We regret that his remarks were aired on MSNBC and apologize for these offensive comments."

But it was so much weak tea, preceded as it was by previous promises by Imus not to resort to such broad and ruthless castigations. David Carr, the media columnist for The New York Times, wrote that Imus' remark was "the kind of unalloyed racial insult that might not have passed muster on a low-watt AM station in the Jim Crow South."

Imus was put on a two-week suspension by both WFAN/CBS and MSNBC. That might have been enough if not for something unexpected of Imus' usual targets. The Rutgers team decided to fight back.

The team's coach, Vivian Stringer, spoke eloquently about the impact of Imus' words on the team, and the wider signal it sent about America. Her comments -- long-winded but surely heartfelt -- had the devastating impact of a watershed event. In their own way, Stringer's respone and that of the black members of the team were the same kind of cri du coeur as those made by Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the House Un-American Activities committee hearings in 1953. "At long last, Mr. Imus," Stringer seemed to say, "have you no sense of decency?"

Imus was fired by MSNBC on April 11. CBS Radio cashiered him yesterday.

Popular culture, being the debris-strewn superhighway that it sometimes is, will grow around this little episode. Imus will no doubt turn up somewhere else in the information ether, hopefully a little wiser and circumspect about what he says, more learned in doing one of pop-culture's more enduring dance steps: the Mea Culpa Mea Culpa Kum Ba Yah.

But his comments had an impact beyond the words containing the comments, and an object lesson for anyone who works with words for a living.

For many people, maybe the most galling thing about the Imus comments weren't specific to the comments themselves. Imus’ commentary proved, absolutely and undeniably, just how low the behavioral baseline for public discourse has fallen in recent years. With his acutely ridiculous statement, it was no longer enough to be a card-carrying rap artist with gold chains, gold teeth, a gold Glock, ready cash and an appetite for the trademark excesses of the thug life (all of that mental construction as much a fabrication, an imitation of life, as anything remotely resembling reality).

Don Imus reset the mark: Now, and especially if you were African American and young, you were a target if you were ordinary people, hard-working, hard-studying exemplars of middle-class values, people putting one foot in front of the other, trying to survive. Imus’ remarks wounded precisely because of the pointless randomness of their intended targets. Everyone, no matter who you are, how undeserving of ridicule, everyone can be a target of the angry cosmology of John Donald Imus.

Words can hurt, words can damage. Anyone who truly respects the power of words understands that. Ten or twenty years later than he should have, Don Imus is learning that now.
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Image credit: Time magazine