Word: jock
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...immediate danger in the way we examine the lives of mass killers. Earnestly and honestly, detectives and journalists dig up apparent clues and weave them into a sort of explanation. In the days after Columbine, for example, Harris and Klebold emerged as alienated misfits in the jock culture of their suburban high school. We learned about their morbid taste in music and their violent video games. Largely missing, though, was the proper frame around the picture: the extreme narcissism that licensed these boys, in their minds, to murder their teachers and classmates...
Imus was, somehow, the highbrow incarnation of what has come to be known as the “shock jock,” the radio host whose flimsy moral fiber and gleeful coprolalia earn him the respect and adulation of the common folk. It took a handful of references to Hillary Clinton as “Satan” and “that buck-toothed witch” (epithets people across the country invoke daily for no reward at all) to win him 1.6 million listeners a week and the sponsorship from Bigelow...
Thus we must pity the chastened shock jock, for he knows not what he does. Perhaps he’s that rapscallion whose ribald humor, so popular on the jungle gym, is arbitrarily condemned by the grown-ups, while the other rascals escape unscathed. The justification for his punishment eludes him, yet he must desperately try to seem sorry...
Despite the risks, it remains relatively easy to be a shock jock, as there exists on the airwaves such a fertile market for peddling prejudice—the more bilious, the better. Every day, millions of Americans gather with guilty grins around the speaker, waiting for the next slur to slide out. The audience doesn’t ever have to echo these views in civil society, only to smirk in silent complicity when they are voiced in the comfort of their sedan...
Better yet: If a shock jock radio talk show host is fired but nobody’s listening, does it really matter...