One of the points I tried to get at in my Imus story was that it was an example of a new kind of media explosion that technology has helped to make possible:
We may be more inured to shock than ever, but when someone manages to find and cross a line, we’re better able to generate, spread and sustain offense. … Every public figure — athlete, pundit, actor — now has two audiences: the one he or she is addressing and the one that will eventually read the blogs or see the viral video. A few have adapted, like Stephen Colbert, whose routine at last year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was decried by attendees as rude and shrill — but made him a hero to his YouTube audience. Imus, a 30-plus-year veteran of radio shock, seemed to underestimate the power of the modern umbrage-amplification machine.
In other words, controversies like Imus’ have a way of being amplified and exploding, not just because the MSM news media go crazy with them, but because the offended can rally online, send mass emails, blog, document offenses and so on–and, thanks to YouTube and so on, can post, review and analyze the offense online. David Carr, in an excellent postmortem at the New York Times today, put it better:
Mr. Imus is an old-school radio guy caught in a very modern media paradigm. When he started 30 years ago, if he made the same kind of remark, it would have floated off into the ether — the Federal Communications Commission, if it received complaints, might have taken notice, but few others.
But radio is now visible — Mr. Imus’s show was simulcast on MSNBC, and more to the point, it is downloadable. By Friday, reporters and advocates could click up the remark on the Media Matters for America Web site, and later YouTube, and see a vicious racial insult that delighted him visibly as it rolled off his tongue. The ether now has a memory.
There are so many kinds of media frenzies nowadays that we’re starting to need different labels for each of them. There’s the old term “media circus,” which makes sense for an extended spectacle like the O.J. Simpson trial; Frank Rich also coined the term “mediathon” for events like the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But that doesn’t quite work for the Imus incident, which I don’t think the media or anyone else has the stamina to make a marathon out of. There’s a newer kind of event, where an item that first seems minor, or at least not mind-blowingly major, starts to pick up resonance and controversy, maybe because it taps into some larger sense of anger, or confirms a suspicion of a certain figure. Then it suddenly blows up as the new-media feedback loop kicks in, outrage boils over, CNN and YouTube and Technorati start blinking red, until at last a head rolls and the scandal vaporizes.
The Trent Lott story was like this; in a way so was the Jayson Blair / Howell Raines story, and Dan Rather/Memogate. It reminds me of the way a little tropical depression lurks in the open sea for days, then suddenly hits a patch of warm water and blows up overnight into a hurricane, which causes immense destruction and spends itself when it hits land. A mediacane?
Actually, somehow “mediaquake” sounds better to me. Imus reminded me this week of nothing so much as a man whom the earth suddenly opened up and swallowed.
PS: I’ll be posting a review of Fox’s weekend debut Drive later — a plain old, no-controversy TV review. As far as I know, no one in it even listens to Don Imus on the car radio.