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IFILL ON IMUS. Highly worth a read :
I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus�s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn�t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.Gwen Ifill is, of course, a bona fide Beltway establishment club member. It's significant when she asks, later in the piece, "Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus�s program? That�s for them to defend, and others to argue about." Indeed, the headline given to her piece is "Trash Talk Radio," but the point here is not that Imus merely typifies crude shock jockery but that he's an institution and fixture among mainstream journalists; in perhaps a sign of some generational divisions (or perhaps not), the profile enjoyed by this truly creepy guy has always struck me as a particularly bizarre element of the DC media landscape.Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.
It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella � his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network � that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.
�Isn�t The Times wonderful,� Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. �It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.�
--Sam Rosenfeld
