Saturday, December 28, 2019

Origins

Don Imus is dead. Here's his New York Times obituary. For all the "Trump country" trips that journalists do to diners in Ohio, it would be a better use of their time to study Don Imus. He wasn't from New York City, but he became integral to its political culture through his decades on radio. And whether from being lucky or good, his show was the morning anchor program on WFAN, otherwise an all-sports station, at the very beginning of the all-sports all-the-time format that now accounts for a sizable chunk of your television content. New York is of course a "liberal" city, but lots of conservatives live in the city, or its suburbs, and a visceral political culture was emerging from the mid-1980s. The timelines for Fox News and its major personalities like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity begin there. Rudy Giuliani thrived in it. And of course, the New Yorker who's now President, Donald Trump. Without Imus, it's more difficult to imagine a President Trump. 

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