Offensive Speech
During the course of this seemingly endless presidential campaign, the American people have been recipients of a number of offensive remarks by supporters of various candidates, remarks aimed at one or another minority group. Barack Obama has had to distance himself from remarks by both Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright that were said to be anti-Semitic and anti-white, and Hillary Clinton has had to account for her husband’s apparently racial interpretation of Obama’s victory in South Carolina.
However, the most publicized recent case of offensive speech was not connected to any political campaign. I’m talking here about Don Imus’ cruel and baseless description of the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Psychologists agree that destructive remarks like those made by Mr. Imus can cause great emotional damage, not only to the Rutgers women specifically, but to Black women generally, diminishing their self image and self confidence.
Have you heard what Imus said about these women? Chances are, you have. (We won’t repeat it here.) Did you hear it from Imus directly, by listening to his show, or from the mainstream media that reprinted and rebroadcast his remarks nearly continuously? If you’re like most of the people on this planet, you learned the content of Mr. Imus’ remarks from the media.
If we wish to condemn and hold accountable those responsible for offensive speech, we need to ask ourselves: Just who is responsible? The dictionary defines “responsible” as “being a source or cause.” By that definition, 99% of the responsibility resides with reporters and anchorpeople, who furrow their brows and feign righteous indignation, saying the offensive words over and over again while trying to look “objective” – as if they are not the primary cause (and beneficiaries, through higher ratings) of the resultant harm. When the media does confront the question of responsibility, it is usually to conclude that responsibility resides with the person who commits the initial offense, not with those who repeat it.
That seems a peculiar argument, given that most bigots aren’t especially creative people. They traffic in stereotype, which by its nature lives through repetition. The swastikas painted on temples today closely resemble those drawn by the Nazis seventy years ago; even so, we hold today’s vandals accountable for their handiwork. If a bank robber were to shoot a teller, then drop his gun and flee, and a customer were to pick up the gun and shoot nine more people, the arithmetic would be fairly clear to us: 10% harm caused by the robber, 90% caused by the customer.
What if we saw the Imus situation in the same way? The damage suffered by Black women who listened to Imus’s show that day was probably close to zero. The harm suffered by Black women everywhere at the hands of the mainstream media — nearly 100% of those who were harmed.
Today’s heightened focus on ethics and compliance tells us that it is no longer acceptable to excuse our own or someone else’s bad behavior on the grounds that “everyone else was doing it.” Perhaps the day will also arrive when “all I did was repeat what someone else said” becomes an equally unacceptable excuse.
Last 5 posts by Steve Kerr
• Inspiring When There's Less to Invest - July 14th, 2009
• Hypocrite or Human? - October 17th, 2007
April 21st, 2008 at 4:18 pm
In my opinion, the purpose of the news is no longer to transmit important information to the public; but rather, to appeal to people’s baser nature solely for financial gain.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office where a television set was tuned to the 5:00 news. The top “story” of the hour consisted of loosely narrated camera footage, taken from a helecopter, of a five year-old boy who had been hit by a car on a residential street in West Los Angeles. The accident had obviously just happened, the ambulance had not yet arrived, and it was clear that the videographer was doing everything he could to obtain unobstructed footage of the carnage. There was nothing else to the story, and I thought to myself: Why is this news?
A few days ago, I logged onto the home page of my preferred internet site, and the featured news story consisted of raw footage of a 12-car pileup. Again I thought to myself: Why is this news? This morning, I logged on again, and the featured story described a fight that broke out on an inane reality television show last night. Need I repeat the question I asked myself?
As an American, I am embarassed about what the U.S. media considers to be news. As a human being, I am heartbroken and disgusted.
Steve Kerr makes an excellent point: Until the press got wind of Don Imus’ comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, the comments had inflicted minimal damage. By working his words up into a story that, over the course of several weeks, took precedence over the war in Iraq, the media not only gave Imus tremendous power to hurt and embarrass the women his comments were directed toward; the media essentially partnered with Imus to fuel the notion that we, as Americans, are hopelessly divided along racial and gender lines, and are victims of each other’s prejudices to such a large extent that we are utterly incapable of working together to achieve common goals.
This begs the question: Why would the media do this? As Steve Kerr pointed out: it’s all about ratings. It is blatantly obvious that a significant percentage of the media cares nothing of the VALUE of the news they choose to report; and will report virtually ANYTHING they believe will increase viewership or readership, regardless of the potential consequences. The short-sited nature of their motivation is shameful, particularly given the tremendous authority they have to shape and guide what people in this country focus on and talk about.
Plainly and simply, until the media embraces that they have a responsibility to do what they do best to effect positive change in the world, and select, develop and deliver the news accordingly, I believe that they will continue to perpetuate and amplify feelings of division, hate, fear and self-pity on a grand scale; and that these feelings will distract us, as human beings, from achieving our full potential and uniting with eachother to benefit the common good. One can only hope that as the world becomes more attuned not only to how vital it is to do the right thing, but also to the immense damage that can result when when we fail to do so, the media will either change its strategy, or become irrelevant in the face of new forms of mass communication and collaboration.