Who Censors Don Imus? The dump-button guy, of course!

[babylonsister]

I imagine this will be the basis of Imus' lawsuit.

http://www.slate.com/id/2165659/fr/flyout

Who Censors Don Imus? The dump-button guy, of course!
By Daniel Engber
Posted Friday, May 4, 2007

Disgraced shock jock Don Imus will sue his former employer, CBS Radio, for $40 million, his lawyer announced Thursday. Imus' contract explicitly allowed him to be "irreverent" and "controversial," the lawyer said, and the radio stations could have censored anything they deemed inappropriate: "Both CBS and MSNBC had a delay button and neither of them used them in this case." Who decides when it's time to bleep out a racist remark?

The dump-button guy. Radio stations typically broadcast their talk shows with a substantial delay, which enables a staffer to monitor the content before it hits the airwaves. This employee sits in a room and listens to a live feed of the show. If he hears something that could be construed as obscene or offensive, he can hit the "delay dump button" to toss out a few seconds of stored audio. A widely syndicated show like Imus in the Morning might have multiple levels of screeners: First, there would be the dump-button guy at his home station—WFAN in New York; each of the affiliate stations that broadcast the show might also have dump-button guys.

The in-house censors must learn which words or phrases might get the station in trouble. That means keeping up to date with the changing FCC decency standards, as well as the attitudes of a parent company like CBS. They also have to make split-second decisions. NPR was so worried about the speed of its censors that it tested their response time with mock callers before Vladimir Putin went on the air for a live call-in show in 2001.

Dump-button guys keep careful notes on what was said each time they bleep something out; after the show, they review these notes with the host and explain their reasoning. In some cases, station lawyers are called in to determine whether a given button press was justified or overcautious. It's de rigueur for a radio host to berate the dump-button guy for overstepping his bounds. In February, Loveline alum Adam Carolla gave "dump guy Lance" the business on the air; Lance seems to have walked off the job a couple of days later.

more..

[Deja Q]

1. A difficult job to do, dumping buttons... Shouldn't the big dump who gets paid more have the

ultimate responsibility, however?

The dump-button presser shouldn't be the scapegoat, though a warning wouldn't come amiss... but Imus is the one who SAID it, not the button pusher.

And if Imus was taking notes from the rap industry or anyone else that can get away with saying "ho" in the context of "prostitute", maybe they need to clean up their acts too? Imus isn't alone in the filthy nature of the media... and the suits that have no qualms letting things get this bad despite having pundits like Bill O'Reilly say things have gotten bad but also lack the guts to say who's behind the people talking -- and those are the people opening their wallets, knowing that the nasty stuff sells the most.

[ComerPerro]

2. Thats pretty pathetic of Imus, to blame the censor for not stopping him

It will be intersting to watch the Imus sychophants on this one, though. They will go from "They have no right to cut off his free speech rights" like they have been saying since the incident, to suddenly attackign the network for, well, not cutting off his free speech rights.

Hi-larious.