If you have been reading the news lately, you will have read about Don Imus, a former CBS radio host who was fired last Thursday for calling members of Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s.”

What led to his firing? At a superficial glance, perhaps it was completely due to Imus’s bad judgment in using offensive terms to describe a team of young athletes. Certainly, some believe his statement warranted immediate firing. But a recent article in The Wall Street Journal (http://www.freepress.net/news/22398), which describes the sequence of events that cumulated in Imus’s unemployment, shows that information cascades and network effects were also at work.

In the first two days after Imus’s show on Wed., no major media outlet picked up his story, although a liberal media watchdog sent a clip of Imus’s show to hundreds of reporters and the National Association of Black Journalists had denounced his comments in a public statement.

Each reporter who got wind of Imus’s comments had to make a decision about whether or not to cover the story based on his/her signal of whether or not this was a newsworthy story. In the beginning, reporters were getting “low” signals, but on Friday, after Imus made a public apology on his radio show, the signal switched to “high.” A cascade started, and reporters began calling CBS and MSNBC in large numbers.

While the media coverage was taking off, CBS and MSNBC still were trying to decide on a course of action. CBS had initially planned to suspend Imus for only two weeks. An executive overseeing some of the radio stations airing Imus’s program said that ‘“nobody had a firm hand on it,”’ and local stations said “the situation was drifting,” according to the WSJ. At this point, I believe Imus’s situation could have worsened or improved – either was a possibility.

Then, opinion-leaders began to criticize Imus. The Reverend Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson organized rallies over the weekend, and Procter & Gamble, one of CBS’s most conservative advertisers, began to talk of pulling their advertising. I would argue that after these leaders became involved, Imus’s fate was sealed. Many other advertisers decided to pull their advertising after P&G announced its decision, even though some had not planned to. P&G’s action had a network effect – it decreased the payoff for the remaining advertisers in CBS’s network. From the point of view of an individual advertiser, the risk of being the only advertiser “supporting” Imus’s remarks increased, and each company wanted to pull out so it wouldn’t be the only advertiser left. In addition, P&G’s action could have helped to start an information cascade. Each advertiser had its own information on how much sticking with CBS would damage public relations. Perhaps most advertisers thought that it would only damage them a little. However, seeing the actions of P&G and one or two other companies, the remaining advertisers that had low signals would infer that the ones who pulled out had a “high” damage signal, and so they rationally followed these companies.

The other interesting thing about Imus’s story is that he went onto Sharpton’s show in an attempt to apologize, but he only succeeded in fueling the flames. To extrapolate a bit on the discussion of network clusters we had in class, we can see that Al Sharpton is a focal point in a cluster sharply opposed to Imus, and he might have had few friends outside of this cluster. Within this network perspective, Imus had little chance of getting Sharpton to “adopt” an alternative viewpoint. Perhaps a more effective strategy for Imus would have been to find supporters farther away from the cluster’s center (who might have a larger percentage of friends outside the cluster), or supporters outside the cluster but still with many friends in the cluster. Imus could also have tried to enlist the support of influential people, such as a celebrity, to fight against the network effects of Sharpton and P&G.

Without any judgment about whether Imus deserved to get fired, what do you think Imus could have done to tip the situation in his favor and save his job?