Don Imus' Second Act

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Richard Drew / AP Photo With a strong debut on Fox Business Network, Don Imus is back in ring and talking about race again—and Al Sharpton’s "monitoring" the situation. But one top media buyer is balking: "I don't get the concept of radio on TV."

Thirty-eight minutes into his Monday morning debut on the Fox Business Network—a much-heralded return to brand-name cable after 2 ½ years in exile—Don Imus couldn’t help but start musing about “The Incident,” the blunder that nearly killed his career and has shaped his image ever since.

“My reaction to The Incident was purely personal,” Imus said, before slipping into a self-conscious meditation on race and Barack Obama. The Incident, of course, was his catastrophic quip on April 4, 2007 about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team (“nappy-headed hos,” in case anyone has forgotten) and his subsequent punishment and humiliation—going on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show to grovel and apologize, only to be coldly rebuffed; getting fired from his syndicated radio show, which he’d been doing day in and day out for four decades, and being removed from MSNBC, where the cable simulcast of his radio program had filled the 6-to-9 a.m. time slot for the previous 11 years.

The question remains: Will Imus’ older-skewing audience stick around for the business news when they could be watching CNBC?

Now the 69-year-old Imus, battling prostate cancer and looking waxy and thin—“like an anorexic fly-rod with a cowboy hat,” in the words of his longtime sidekick, news reader Charles McCord—is finally back in the saddle. But two days in, it’s unclear where his horse is headed, exactly.

“I thought it wasn’t a horrible idea to put a black face in the White House,” Imus ventured to his very first guest, journalist Debra Dickerson, who—coincidentally or not—happens to be African American. “It doesn’t seem like it has done all that much for race relations—or has it?”

Dickerson—on the phone from Albany—argued that “a large segment of the white population cannot bear” the thought of a black president, hence the frequent insinuations of foreign birth, fascism, socialism, and all-around otherness. “‘I want my country back’—that’s about more than just power,” Dickerson said as Imus, on his best behavior, listened respectfully. “Talking about the Nazis? What is that about?... It’s heartbreaking to me… It’s just a very ugly time in America.”

The I-Man’s next guest: Glenn Beck—the reckless purveyor of everything Dickerson was complaining about. The Fox News star made fun of Dickerson and then compared notes with Imus on their mutual bouts with alcoholism (Beck’s poison: Jack Daniel’s; Imus’: Stolichnaya).

“Really? Glenn Beck was next? Now I kind of feel icky. I feel a little dirty,” Dickerson sighed when I caught up with her a few hours later. “Ha ha,” she added dryly, when I told her that Imus, in a discussion with another first-day guest, Sen. John McCain, repeated a “joke” that after 9/11 “President Obama was the second attack on America.” (McCain, on the phone, laughed more heartily.) Dickerson said Imus, whom she has gotten to know since she began appearing on his radio show a couple of years ago, was very keen on booking her for his FBN debut. “He kept asking and asking,” she said.

Was she was being used as a racial fig leaf?

“Call me naïve, but I think he just likes me,” Dickerson said, noting that she was initially reluctant to go on two years ago, but her journalism students at the State University of New York insisted she had to. “I think he was so brutalized by what he did and by what he has suffered, maybe he likes me because I have embraced him and defended him, and I think he likes and respects my work,” she said. “Maybe having me as a guest is another way to say to black women, ‘I’m really sorry for what I did.’” FBN representatives declined to make either Imus or network executives available for comment.

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