Not surprisingly, Don Imus loses his CBS radio gig in addition to his MSNBC cable TV simulcast; veteran magazine editor Myrna Blyth has a piece in NRO today on the power to bully the legacy media grants to those it gives airtime:

I have never listened to Imus, and the only times I’ve seen him have been when I was flicking through channels in a hotel room, trying to find the morning news. But what struck me the few times I did watch him was his amazing arrogance. And, while I know we’re not supposed to criticize people for their appearance, this funny-looking guy in a funny-looking cowboy hat sure does get a lot of power when he’s sitting behind a microphone. David Frum in his Diary gives an example of Imus’s arrogance. For years, right up to this current fracas, he has been able to freely use his power to sneer at others and get the audience to laugh along. Imus, quite simply, is a bully, and he’s made that pay big. And like a bully about to lose a fight, he has started sniveling and proclaiming what a good and generous guy he really is.

The other great bully on TV right now is Rosie, who has her daily soapbox on The View. It’s her schoolyard bullying tactics, which she so effectively employs on that girlie show, much more than her crackpot conspiracy theories, that I find most objectionable. Day after day, like a true grade-school tyrant, she shouts down anyone who disagrees with her, steps on any applause another opinion might elicit, and, like Imus with his sidekicks, gets the other women on The View to agree with and support her.

Rosie is also an expert at playing the victim and making excuses for herself. As she constantly explains, she suffers from depression and her mother died when she was young — and she is very generous, too. Of course, Rosie, in true bully fashion, is afraid to have anyone on the show who might have the power to say, “Hey, Rosie, put up your dukes,” and then, through argument, win a fair fight with her.

Maybe the next media tempest will be when Rosie goes too far. Although she is very well protected, it probably will happen, and the pundits will once again have the chance to talk about the one thing they all agree upon — the enormous power those in media now have.

A couple of weeks ago, Libertas had a great post on A Face In The Crowd, Elia Kazan’s's seminal late 1950s movie about a populist figure given a national platform by television who quickly becomes a demagogue. When I saw the movie for the first time on TMC or AMC in the late 1990s, Andy Griffith's performance in the lead role (which instantly put him on the map in Hollywood) reminded me instantly of James Carville; some might instead see Rush or O'Reilly in it. But it really is a dramatic foreshadowing of how today's media both invents public figures, lets them run fast, loud, and out of control, usually until its too late, and then quickly pulls the plug on them, and is well worth your time on DVD or next time it's on cable.

In one sense, the current hyperventilating by Imus, Rosie, Sharpton, et al represent the death rumbles of an eighty year old mass electronic media in an era when everyone will eventually have his own blog--and heck, if they want it bad enough, their own TV station. But considering how well a fifty year old movie still depicts today's events, the medium may change, but not the urge to demagogue it.