Don Imus Is Punished With Two Weeks of Radio Silence

Then Imus spoke at great length about the ranch in New Mexico he founded nearly 10 years ago for kids with "cancer, blood disorders and so on."

"And nearly half of the kids who come there are from minority groups. . . . An Asian American girl just won the Imus Ranch rodeo this past spring. . . . Ten percent of the kids who come to our ranch are African American. I'm not a white man who doesn't know any African Americans."

He said the women from the Rutgers team "need to know . . . that I'm a good person who said a bad thing."

The "bad thing" he said on Wednesday's show started when he and his exec producer, Bernard McGuirk, were looking at video of the women's collegiate basketball championship on Tuesday night between Rutgers and the University of Tennessee.

McGuirk called the teammates on the floor "some hardcore hos."

"That's some nappy-headed hos there, I'm going to tell you that," Imus said.

Later in the show, McGuirk said it was like watching "the Jigaboos versus the Wannabes."

"Mr. Imus, you think it's funny to call people 'nappy-headed hos'?" Sharpton asked on his syndicated show yesterday. (Sharpton has also demanded that Imus be fired for his comments.)

Imus said he did not.

Imus said when he made the comments, "I didn't think it was racial. I wasn't even thinking racial. I was thinking, like a 'West Side Story' deal, like one team's tough and one team's not so tough."

He said of his reaction to his exec producer's comment, "My frame of reference is a Spike Lee film."

Sharpton told Imus, "It's not about whether you're a good man; this is about setting a precedent that allows racist language to be used in mainstream, federally regulated television and radio."