A Chastened Imus Returns to RadioBy JACQUES STEINBERG
Nearly eight months after he was fired for making a racially and sexually disparaging remark about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, Don Imus went back on the radio at 6 a.m. today and vowed he would not say anything like that again.
He also introduced two new cast members — a black woman, Karith Foster, and a black man, Tony Powell, both of them comedians
(can you say the word "token?"-dp) — and said they would join him in conducting “an ongoing discussion about race relations in this country.”
“I will never say anything in my lifetime that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me,” Mr. Imus told an audience that was listening in person at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, and at home and in their cars on WABC-AM, his new radio home. “And no one else will say anything on my program that will make anyone think I did not deserve a second chance.”
Still, in many ways, it felt as if the clock had been turned back before last April, when Mr. Imus said what he said and was fired by CBS Radio and MSNBC, which had simulcast his program on cable television.
“Dick Cheney is still a war criminal,” Mr. Imus, 67, told the audience, in an effort to reassure them that he did not intend to completely alter his style, or curb his tongue. “Hillary Clinton is still Satan. And I’m going on the radio.”
On stage at Town Hall this morning, he was flanked on his right by his longtime news reader and sidekick, Charles McCord. Seated to his left, with a microphone conspicuously in front of him, was Bernard McGuirk, the producer whose initial reference on April 4 to the Rutgers team as “some hard-core hos” had prompted Mr. Imus to pile on by calling them “nappy-headed hos.”
The roster of announced guests was familiar to any regular Imus listener. They included Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who is seeking the Democratic nomination; the author Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the political strategists James Carville and Mary Matalin.
And some long-time advertisers, too, came back, including the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey; NetJets, the corporate aircraft leasing company; the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, and Bigelow teas. The house band was led by Levon Helm, who had played for Mr. Imus on April 12, which had wound up being his last day.
Mr. Imus wore a tan cowboy hat, a gold-colored vest under a tan barn jacket and worn boots. In his initial remarks, Mr. Imus spoke to the audience from a lone microphone positioned at center stage. At some points, he was defiant, acknowledging that the Rutgers team, which met with him the night of his firing, had found it easier to forgive him than had some of his detractors.
“We signed for five years,” he said of his contracts with Citadel Radio, the parent of WABC, as well as with RFD-TV, which will simulcast his program. “That’s how long it’s going to take to get even with everybody.”
And yet, for all his bravado, Mr. Imus acknowledged that he had been chastened and, at times, humiliated these last few months, and that he ultimately deserved his punishment.
“I think things worked out the way they should have worked out,” he said. “We now have the opportunity to have a better program, to obviously diversify the cast.”
He added, though: “The program is not going to change.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/business/media/03cnd-imus.html?em&ex=1196830800&en=d80a3768b78369e3&ei=5087%0A
