Fortunately for all of us, the thing that got Imus shut down was economic pressure from the private sector, not government fiat. The market worked very, very efficiently in this case, but censorship it ain’t. We must insist on understanding censorship to be government suppression of speech, not the actions of voluntary associations (corporations) exercising their prerogatives in response to market realities.
In other words, hand-wringing about “suppressing free speech” in the Imus case is totally misdirected. Imus has the same right to use offensive speech he had before; CBS and MSNBC just aren’t obligated to pay him to exercise it. In other words: it is as it should be.
qb
P. S. No fan of Sharpton or Jackson is qb, but losing Imus from the airwaves ain't much of a loss to the nation's political speech, either. *yawn*
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