After sliming the Duke [1]lacrosse players [1]falsely accused of raping a stripper, Times sports columnist Selena Roberts returned to school on Wednesday [2]with "A First Class Response to a Second-Class Putdown," about the Don Imus-Rutgers University women's basketball team controversy, in which the talk radio host denigrated the team by referring to them as "nappy-headed ho's."
Roberts gushed about the Rutgers' players speaking truth to power: "Of grace and dignity, without a single boob joke for ratings or a raunchy sidekick for on-air laughs, the women wearing Rutgers scarlet managed to capsize society's power differential yesterday....But possessing the power differential means bullying someone your own size. With the ear of a national audience, Imus denigrated women who have revealed the courage to play a sport in its pure, fundamental form even though it is often branded inferior to the dunk style of men. The gals absorb enough put-downs as it is."
This marks huge hypocrisy on the part of Roberts, given that in the Duke lacrosse case, she eagerly sided with two separate bases of "power "- an out-of-control local prosecutor, Michael Nifong, who now faces an ethics complaint from the North Carolina bar association, as well as a politically correct college faculty and administration eager to side with what they considered an oppressed minority victim.
Not to mention Roberts herself, a prominent sports columnist in the nation's most influential newspaper, with the eyes if not the ear of a national audience that's comparable to that of Imus (as the MRC's Brent Baker [3]demonstrated [3], Imus's TV and radio ratings are quite low).