Word: shockely
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...together enough real or potential financing to keep the Eakins at home in a joint purchase by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the much smaller Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), with the same kind of back-and-forth lending between the two institutions. Then came the next shock. To defray its part of the purchase, PAFA announced it was selling a lesser but still important Eakins, The Cello Player. One Eakins saved, one lost...
...That context is not as kind to Imus. He comes out of the shock jock tradition, but all shock jocks are not created equal. If Opie & Anthony or Mancow had made the "nappy-headed" comment, it wouldn't have been a blip because future Presidents do not do cable-news interviews with Opie & Anthony and Mancow...
...flip side of the instant-attention era is the gotcha era. We may be more inured to shock than ever, but when someone manages to find and cross a line, we're better able to generate, spread and sustain offense. You get eaten by the same tiger that you train. Imus got special love from the media over the years because his show was such a media hangout. But when the controversy erupted, it snowballed in part because the media love to cover the media...
...blogs or see the viral video. A few have adapted, like Stephen Colbert, whose routine at last year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner was decried by attendees as rude and shrill - but made him a hero to his YouTube audience. Imus, a 30-plus-year veteran of radio shock, seemed to underestimate the power of the modern umbrage-amplification machine. The day after his remarks, Imus said dismissively on air that people needed to relax about "some idiot comment meant to be amusing." Shockingly, they did not, and by the next day, Imus had tapped an inner wellspring...
...there are people. We draw and redraw them by constantly arguing them. This is how we avoid throwing out the brilliance of a Sacha Baron Cohen - who offends us to point out absurdities in our society, not just to make "idiot comments meant to be amusing" - with a shock jock's dirty bathwater. It's a draining, polarizing but necessary process...