http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/lelong4.html
Imus and the Nappy-Headed Ho’s
by A.D Lelong
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But with Rev. Sharpton it’s different. He IS offended. Would he have been offended if Imus had called some Wisconsin women’s basketball team (assuming they were of Scandinavian descent) “Cheese headed Viking Amazons”? Would The Rev. Al Sharpton have been in high dudgeon had Imus referred to a Boston Jesuit College women’s basketball team by saying, “a bunch of freckled, whiskey drinking bricktop sluts”? I don’t think so. And most Americans of Norse or Irish decent wouldn’t have either. Maybe a couple church groups, here and there, but this would not have become a national hot issue.
What is really at issue here is that Sharpton is a professional race card player. It is his stock in trade. It is the only real vocation he ever had. It has made him good copy in the NYC and national media. He can get reporters to show up at a press conference. And he knows how to use the media to bully his victims.
Now I don’t begrudge a mountebank from earning his daily bread, but when I see Rev. Al talk about using the FCC to get Imus fired for doing his puerile shtick, this has serious ramifications for free speech. Sharpton said (and I’m paraphrasing) that we own the air waves and have a right to remove someone who abuses his position. Actually, “we” don’t own the air waves. There are no stock certificates in air wave frequencies. They have been usurped by the government starting with the Radio Act of 1912 after the Titanic sinking. Radio licenses are in effect government rented easements, like feudal lease-hold estates. They can be rescinded just like a king could revoke a writ of title from an earl. The radio stations own them as a peer owns his title.
The mere hint of a threat of losing a license terrifies ALL radio station license holders. And given that most license holders are corporations controlled by an unthinking collective of conformist non-intellectual executives, without regard to principle or rational thought, a Sharpton figure has a chilling effect on free expression by the talk-host employee. Sharpton has a radio show on a station here in NYC. Did he lose his time-slot when he referred to White business owners in Harlem as “white interlopers” after the Freddy’s department store fire on 125th street 12 years ago when a black gunman shot up and torched the store killing 8 in protest because the white owner did not hire enough blacks? Was Sharpton punished when he failed to distance himself from Jesse Jackson and his “Hymietown” remark? Or the Tawana Brawley hoax? Or when he called the Central Park jogger, beaten almost to death and brain damaged, a “whore”?
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I have a feeling that the whole Imus affair is going to have some interesting ramifications. Perhaps, the USA will wake up to the fact they are being manipulated.
Reinke Faces Life 