Media Frames and Displacement of Blame in the Don Imus/Rutgers Women's Basketball Team Incident: Sincere Fictions and Frenetic Inactivity

Abstract

Shock jock radio by its very nature involves the creation of spectacle through outrageous utterances that simultaneously reinforce and resist dominant norms (Nylund, 2007). Self-proclaimed media “bad boy” Don Imus referred to the Rutgers University Scarlett Knights, National Collegiate Athletic Association (N.C.A.A.) women's basketball championship runner-ups as “nappy headed hos” during an April 4, 2007, broadcast of his “Imus in the Morning” radio show, simulcast on MSNBC. Applying Foucault's concepts of sin and redemption to this media event, we explore dominant media frames of the Don Imus incident. We ask, “what do dominant media frames reveal about agendas of privilege and oppression in media discourse?” Textual and content analysis of national and regional U.S. newspapers explicates dominant media framings of the narratives of Imus's apology and his subsequent dismissal from radio and television. We discuss what these narratives reveal about media frames of the displacement of blame, sin, and redemption. We conclude that the Imus event and the subsequent assignation of blame operate to maintain “sincere fictions” that minimize racism in the larger culture, while amounting to what we call “frenetic inaction” around structural sources of social inequalities.