NPR's It's Only a Game is on most occasions a nice Saturday morning diversion, where lyrical remembrances of games past mix with some not-so-serious analysis of sports around the country. But if you were listening to this morning's show, there was some electric commentary by sports journalist Charlie Pierce. Asked about the Imus controversy, Pierce bypassed the BS and got straight to the heart of the matter.
Pierce: ...this was a camel carrying a great many straws. I think there's a lot of soul-searching involved from people in my business and in the political business for why they enabled this pathetic 70-year-old "bad boy" for as long as they did... any professional communicator who said anything like this on a national microphone should be fired, and who I really admire in all this are the NBC news employees who apparently went to their bosses and said "him or us."
From there, Pierce and Only a Game host, Bill Littlefield, did the one thing that the guys at the "news" desk have proved utterly unwilling to do: they took on the idiocy that surrounds this issue, and redirected the heat where it's well deserved.
Pierce: for all the bloviating about rap music, and why can they say this, and we can't, and blah blah blah -- which is a variation on a very old and very stupid argument -- let's see if it has any affect on the sponsors of people like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, and Glenn Beck who has his own national television show. Let's go see if the political dialog gets cleaned up in this country. Why you're seeing all this dust thrown up about rap music is because people don't want to concentrate on the kind of polite obscenity that white talk show hosts, particularly white conservative talk show hosts, have been trafficking in for fifteen years.
Charlie Pierce is my hero. It's worth listening to the whole interview (which starts at the 30:40 mark on the audio link), for an equally powerful insight into the Duke lacrosse case and how it relates to American justice in general.
Pierce: If you're concerned about due process and the right of someone to be considered innocent until they're proven guilty, where do we put Guantanamo? This is what we encourage. We cheer prosecutors who do this. We applaud.
I don't think it's a coincidence that later in the same broadcast, there was a piece on Jackie Robinson, reminding us again that baseball was well ahead of politics when it came to civil rights. Sometimes, the sports page is where you have to turn to get the truth.