A Sorry Story, With Apology Yet to Come

Imus's locker-room shtick was always risky, and unfortunately he kept straying over the line until, 12 days ago, he obliterated it. Calling politicians and journalists weasels and worms is fine, but not picking on young student-athletes who overcame obstacles to play for a national championship.

We can argue about whether he should have been given another chance -- Mel Gibson is still making movies, isn't he? -- but Imus was probably doomed when the national debate morphed into an argument over indecency and meanness in broadcasting. He became the symbol of all that was wrong with today's toxic popular culture.

But what about the radio hosts who demean others out of anger or ideology, not misguided humor? Michael Savage was also fired by MSNBC after telling a gay caller that he should "get AIDS and die," but he is now on 370 radio stations. He once called the Million Mom March for gun control the "million dyke march." On his Web site, under "Savage Rap Lyrics," is a song that begins, "If she's got 10 toes, she's a ho."

And that slang word for whore comes, of course, from the thriving rap industry. "Imus should only be fired when the black artists who make millions of dollars rapping about black bitches and hos lose their recording contracts," civil rights lawyer Constance Rice wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "Black leaders should denounce Imus and boycott him and call for his head only after they do the same for the misogynist artists with whom they have shared stages, magazine covers and awards shows."

It would be a welcome development if the national uproar over Imus turned into a sustained examination of others who pollute the airwaves. But the media's attention span is such that they will soon be chasing some new scandal, dropping the decency crusade as quickly as they abandoned the Duke case once the racial story line they had pushed collapsed under the weight of the facts.

Coming Clean

Now it can be told: Matt Cooper thought that Time magazine's strategy in the Valerie Plame leak investigation was "insane." He was unhappy when his lawyer wanted to simultaneously represent I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the man whose identity Cooper was risking jail to protect. And Judith Miller got on his nerves.

Cooper, who has left Time, is now Washington bureau chief for Portfolio, the glossy business magazine from Conde Nast that makes its debut today. The launch is cloaked in secrecy, although word has leaked that Tom Wolfe is writing about hedge funds. But I have penetrated the veil, obtaining the Cooper piece from sources I would go to jail to keep secret -- maybe.

Cooper says he realized early on that he would probably lose the subpoena battle over his refusal to testify about his 2003 discussions regarding Plame with White House aides Libby and Karl Rove. But Time rejected Cooper's plea to compromise by seeking waivers of confidentiality from the officials. "Behind the scenes I desperately wanted to make a deal that could get us out of this mess," he writes.

Norman Pearlstine, then Time Inc.'s editor in chief, decided to hire conservative lawyer Ted Olson. But Cooper's opinion of the former solicitor general declined when Olson asked if he could also represent Libby, which Cooper saw as a conflict since "Libby's defense ultimately involved my word against his." Olson quickly backed off.

Cooper was rankled that "my reporting was becoming linked to Miller's flawed work." He says the then-New York Times reporter, who wound up spending 85 days in jail, "had become the poster girl for leading the country into war." He recalls Miller using a prohibited cellphone in court to dial what she called "my guys in Iraq," the Army unit with which she had been embedded.

Despite Cooper's desire to reach a settlement with the special prosecutor over his testimony, Time's then-managing editor, Jim Kelly, argued that incarceration was unlikely. "It was easier for me to say some of this stuff because I was never heading for jail," Kelly says in the piece. Cooper avoided imprisonment with a last-minute compromise.

Why dredge this up now? "I guess it was cathartic for me to just put it down," Cooper says in an interview. "And I'd already done the reporting."