I don’t care about Don Imus, but the coverage of his recent racial remarks has been pretty lousy.

NYT update here, for example, but see also the AP here, Dallas Morning News here, etc. etc.

One of Imus’s sidekicks was reading a dumb story about a football player named Adam “Pacman” Jones, who has had several run-ins with the police. Jones was apparently thinking about discarding the “Pacman” nickname, apparently to give himself a fresh PR start.

Anyway, Imus, as is his typical practice, listened to the story and interjected this or that little comment, most of them, as is his typical practice, not very clever.

You can hear the audio at Politico, here. Basically, Warner Wolf, the sidekick, talks about Jones’ plan to drop his nickname. Imus asks, “What color is he?” Wolf responds, “He’s African American,” and Imus says, “Well there you go. Now we know.”

After word spread about the remark, Imus said that he’d been being sarcastic, that he’d been trying to make the point that Jones had been being picked on because he’s black. He was even backed up by some of his employees, several of whom are black.

And here’s what he said on the air this a.m.:

“Warner and I were talking about ‘Pacman’ Jones being arrested six times, and obviously they are picking on him. So I asked Warner what color he was. Obviously, I already knew what color he was… And I said there you go, that’s the point. What people should be outraged about is they arrest blacks for no reason. There was no reason to arrest this kid six times.”

“He’s a lovely kid,” Imus went on to say. The only trouble with that explanation is that it seems there was a reason to arrest Jones six times. Here’s some of Jones’ greatest hits, taken from Wikipedia:

• “On July 13, 2005 Jones was arrested on charges of assault and felony vandalism stemming from a nightclub altercation.”
• Later that year, while apparently on probation from the first incident, he got in trouble at another nightclub in Nashville and ended up having the probation extended ninety days.
• “On August 25, 2006, Jones was arrested in Murfreesboro, Tennessee for disorderly conduct and public intoxication after claiming that a woman stole his wallet. She claimed that she did not steal anything and Jones spat on her. Police officers said they ordered Jones to leave several times, but he refused, continuing to shout profanities at the woman.” He was put on probation again.
• “On October 26, 2006. Jones was cited for misdemeanor assault for allegedly spitting in the face of a female student from Tennessee State University during a private party at Club Mystic, a Nashville nightclub.”
• In February 2006 he was charged with “felony and misdemeanor obstruction of justice charges for an incident outside a home.”
• “On June 18, 2007 Jones was sought by police for questioning after a shooting at an Atlanta strip club allegedly involved members of his entourage. According to police at the scene, Jones was not present during the shooting, and is not being charged.”
• And finally, Jones got into a fight with a dancer at a Las Vegas strip club. He had apparently thrown money on the stage and then got mad when she picked it up. “He allegedly grabbed her by her hair and slammed her head on the stage,” Wikipedia says. “After club patrons exited following the original confrontation, the club owner says a person in Jones’ entourage returned with a gun and fired into a crowd, hitting three people, including the security guard involved in the earlier skirmish. The guard was shot twice, and one of the people hit—former professional wrestler Tommy Urbanski—was paralyzed from the waist down. Jones maintains that he did not know the shooter, although the club’s owner insists that Jones did. On March 26, 2007 the Las Vegas Police recommended to the city’s district attorney that Jones be charged with one count of felony coercion as well as one misdemeanor count of battery and one misdemeanor count of threat to life.” Adams was suspended from play for a year.
• Most recently, earlier this year, “Jones was accused of hitting a woman in a strip club in Atlanta, Georgia. […] The woman, Wanda S. Jackson, was seeking an arrest warrant. However, on January 16, Jackson withdrew the warrant.”

CNN says Jones has been arrested a total of six times, and the AP in the original story about the name change that he’s been in 12 different police incidents since 2005.” That’s about once every three months!  Anyway, if Imus is smart enough to know Jones is black, he’s also smart enough to know that Jones isn’t “a lovely kid” and wasn’t being pushed around by good ol’ boy cops—that he’s really a thug who gets into trouble a lot, often in situations that allegedly involve women being spit on, or hit, generally in strip clubs.

Imus’s rationale, in other words, doesn’t make sense on its own terms. (Not to mention the fact that the explanation is just as offensive against women in the way it diminishes the severity of what Jones has been accused of.) Why isn’t that mentioned in the coverage? Imus’s shtick has always been infantile when it comes to race; he’s one of these guys who compulsively blurts out racial stuff in situations that reveal nothing more than the fact that he’s got race on his mind. The scandal about all the celebrities and political figures who fawn on Imus is less about his being racist as just being a fuckhead.

Speaking of fuckheads, here’s what Jones, who apparently should just be in jail, had to say about the incident: :

“I’m truly upset about the comments. Obviously Mr. Imus has problems with African-Americans. I’m upset, and I hope the station he works for handles it accordingly. I will pray for him.”