Ronald Reagan, however, began an era of public racism by characterizing Black women as “welfare queens” and by inferring that Blacks were the source of much of America’s social problems – problems of their own making – thus, helping to elevate a negative racial dialogue into the public discourse.  
  
To add serious grit to this putdown of Blacks, he attacked the civil rights movement and its leadership by inferring that they benefited financially by keeping race friction alive. Thus, from the White House, a negative racial animus flowed so strong that the chairman of the board of the NAACP in 1986 criticized the occupant of the White House, for the first time in history, as being “racist.”
  
In this environment, the conservative movement needed a connection to the grassroots and the conservative “shock jocks” began to fill that role. Money began to flow and, from 1982 to 1985, WNBC in New York employed both Howard Stern and Don Imus, who they had fired in 1977 for his abuse of cocaine and vodka. By 1988, WNBC died and he was hired by WFAN and, from that posture, he attracted millions of grassroots conservative listeners. 
  
The movement didn’t stop there. In 1988, Rush Limbaugh was given a nationally syndicated show on AM radio and, by 2005, his followers had grown to 13.5 million, with 56 percent of hard news listeners, meaning that they were conduits for Limbaugh’s views into the political system. 
  
Limbaugh went on to become a mega-millionaire superstar in the right wing universe and a noted drug addict as well. Indeed, talk radio was taken over by conservative voices with the addition of powerful personalities such as Michael Savage in the San Francisco market in 2000.
  
These radio programs served as an outlet for books, lectures and the general dissemination of right wing propaganda with a strong racist bent, which seemed not to bother the host of politicians and high profile (mostly White) personalities who appeared on their shows. 
  
In fact, the tag-team combination of conservative radio with the arrival of Fox News, launched in 1996 to 17 million viewers with shows such as “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Hannity and Colmes,” created a major forum for the legitimization of conservative views. 
  
The use of the media in this fashion to mobilize what I have called “White nationalist” ideology as public opinion has had a devastating impact on public policy associated with the progress of the Black community. Politicians in the ‘80s and ’90 debated welfare, crime, affirmative action and other issues with a powerful racial subtext, as though Blacks were the target of the action as the perpetrators of the social evils they abhorred.
  
The chickens came home to roost with the 1994 Republican Revolution which gave conservative politicians control of Congress and a platform to push their views into official policy.
  
One has to ask how it was that the major media, such as the television networks, the editorial pages of the Washington Post and other newspapers gradually shifted to accommodate right wing voices and, in the process, squeeze out (always marginal) legitimate Black opinion.
   
The direct answer is that it made money for them and kept their shareholders happy enough not to worry about the moral implications of legitimizing this element, or how far it moved the country away from racial tolerance or real democratic practice.   
  
So, regardless of what MSNBC or CBS says, the basic decision on Imus has and, unfortunately, will be made on the bottom line. Knowing that, Blacks and their allies have to be just as cold-blooded in using the leverage of pressure against media financiers to extract social justice. 
  
From what I have tried to say, the Imus case is just a drop in the bucket and that might not have happened if the attack against Blacks had not been made using outstanding, but defenseless young Black women. Trying to set up civil rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (where is the NAACP?) as the villains won’t work, unless we help.

Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, director of the African American Leadership Institute, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland at College Park. Among his latest books is “White Nationalism, Black Interests” (Wayne State University Press).