Anyone who didn’t think this was going to happen eventually when he left the air in April was kidding themselves:
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 — 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. 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.”
I was among the crowd who thought that what Imus said was stupid, but I never thought he should be fired for it. So, in that sense, it’s good that he’s back on the air.
If you’re at all interested, you can listen live from WABC’s website.
