It's suddenly news that Don Imus shores up his ratings with racist cracks at blacks and Hispanics? Only now, by insulting the women athletes of Rutgers as "nappy-headed ho's," has he crossed the Rubicon of racism and the shout has at last gone up, Has Imus no decency? It's like announcing Bluebeard veered into unforgivable moral excess when he knocked off wife number five.

With the full sanction of his employers--primarily CBS and NBC--the man's been at it for years, along with his sidekicks, Bernard McGuirk and Sid Rosenberg. Ishmael Reed has a brisk résumé of choice moments on Imus in the Morning in a piece in End Times, a very fine new book on the death of the Fourth Estate written mostly by Jeffrey St. Clair and myself.

"On any day," Reed wrote, "you might find Bernard McGuirk, the man who, according to 60 Minutes, Imus hired to do 'nigger jokes,' doing a lame imitation of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, using a plantation-type dialect. Blacks who are satirized by McGuirk and others are usually displayed as committing malapropisms.... Black athletes are referred to as 'knuckle draggers.'"

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