Watch Your Backs, MSNBC! Imus Can See You!

Not long ago, shortly after dawn, Don Imus sat behind a live microphone and let his mind linger for a moment on Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe. The day before, he had watched Harry Smith on CBS’s Face the Nation interview Secretary of State Clinton about such things as Iran’s nuclear ambitions. What, Mr. Imus now wondered, was with her red pantsuit? “I don’t know if I would have worn it,” said Mr. Imus. “It was not flattering.”

It was the morning of Monday, Sept. 28, and Mr. Imus was at work in a new studio inside the News Corporation headquarters in midtown Manhattan. In just seven days, News Corp.’s two-year-old foray into financial reporting, the Fox Business Network (FBN), would begin simulcasting Mr. Imus’ morning radio show (which is currently broadcast by WABC and syndicated nationally by Citadel) into some 50 million American homes. This was a test run—which was airing on the radio, but not on television.

>>READ FELIX GILLETTE'S BACK STORY ON IMUS' MOVE TO FBN

Over the next four hours, Mr. Imus took his listeners on a typically rollicking ride through the world of American politics and journalism. Along the way, he interviewed Rudolph Giuliani about terrorism prevention, joked that Governor Paterson would look cooler if he wore sunglasses, poked fun at Bo Dietl’s reading habits, tested Warner Wolf’s religious fidelity on Yom Kippur, reminisced about a shuttered Papaya King, questioned why American soldiers were still being sent to Afghanistan and called Bob Woodward a pompous jerk.

The new studio, Mr. Imus explained at one point to his listeners, was located on the third floor of the News Corp. building, overlooking Sixth Avenue, at 48th Street—not far from his former place of employment at NBC. For 11 years, MSNBC simulcast Imus in the Morning from a studio at Rockefeller Plaza. But in the spring of 2007, after Mr. Imus referred to the women on the Rutgers basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” and amid the subsequent uproar, NBC dumped him. “I can’t ignore the fact that there is a very long list of inappropriate comments, of inappropriate banter,” NBC News’ president, Steve Capus, said at the time. “And it has to stop.”

Some two and a half years later, on his first day in the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, Mr. Imus took a sidelong glance back at his old lair. “You can nearly see our old office at NBC from here,” said Mr. Imus. “I’m just wondering if they ever found the cocaine in there. It was hidden in the walls.”

These days, of course, many of Mr. Imus’ new coworkers are locked in a multiheaded feud with NBC and would probably like nothing more than to see a team of drug-sniffing police dogs descend on the professional home of the likes of Keith Olbermann. But unleashing Don Imus to compete against NBC, the media company that shunned him in his time of crisis, might be even better.

“I don’t know to what degree Fox will let him nurse any grudge he has at MSNBC while he’s on FBN,” said Aaron Barnhart, the TV critic for The Kansas City Star. “But if the past is any precedent, I’m pretty sure they’ll say, ‘Don, let it rip.’”

When Fox executives first announced the partnership with Mr. Imus back in the early days of September, much of the subsequent media analysis focused on what the programming coup would mean in terms of FBN’s two-year-old, losing rivalry with CNBC. Since launching in October of 2007, as an explicit challenger to NBC’s lucrative cable financial channel, FBN has struggled to attract many viewers. Some critics now argued that the addition of Mr. Imus would finally present CNBC with a serious challenge. Others wondered if FBN was simply giving up on business news altogether. But, at least in the short term, the arrival of Don Imus on FBN is less likely to impact CNBC than it is another NBC franchise—namely, MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

“They are going to take a serious run at MSNBC,” said William O’Shaughnessy, the author and longtime radio executive. “Imus’ show will pose problems for them. I think it’s going to give [FBN] a hell of a boost. And I think they’ll take most of it out of the hide of Morning Joe. I don’t know who else they would hurt in the morning.”

AFTER CANCELING Imus in the Morning two-odd years ago, MSNBC executives held a bake-off among various anchors to see who would replace Mr. Imus. In the end, Joe Scarborough, the sharp-witted former Republican congressman from Florida, beat out the likes of David Gregory. Since then, Morning Joe has gone on to attract a slightly larger audience than Mr. Imus’ program ever did in its heyday. In September 2009, Morning Joe averaged 373,000 total viewers versus Imus’s 354,000 during his last full month on MSNBC, in March 2007.

That said, the blueprint is essentially the same. The humor may be substantively different (deadpan irony vs. off-color remarks), but otherwise the tone and substance of the two shows is remarkably similar. Both offer a serious-absurd, high-low critique of America’s ruling class and the people who document it. Each features a cranky paternal figure, surrounded by adoring colleagues, alternating between praise and trepidation over America’s place in the world. Both are enlivened by a recurring cast of journalists, authors and political operatives matching minds in an unscripted arena.

In past interviews, Mr. Scarborough has acknowledged the debt. “Imus laid a lot of the groundwork, where people expected serious interviews,” Mr. Scarborough told The Observer earlier this year while reflecting back on the early days of Morning Joe. “But I wanted to do three hours of hard news without the frat-Imus interviews or the imitations.”

As of Oct. 5, for the first time since the debut of Morning Joe, fans of the form will get to select from two choices: Don or Joe? At the same time, the band of pundits who now regularly appear on Morning Joe will face a choice of their own—if invited, will they appear on Imus? In recent days, The Observer reached out to a number of the key members of Mr. Scarborough’s salon to see whether they felt proprietary loyalty to Joe and MSNBC. For the most part, they dodged us. Through a spokesperson, Mark Halperin declined to comment. Rick Stengel, Jon Meacham, Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy did not respond to emails. Which is perhaps not surprising. Why signal one’s willingness or unwillingness to appear on the show without yet knowing whether a significant audience will materialize? For the time being, it would appear that most everyone is lingering on the sideline, keeping close tabs on the shifting sands of self-interest and self-promotion.

ONE OF THE pleasures of listening to Mr. Imus is the sudden and unpredictable ferocity of his critical mind. Not knowing when or where the next haymaker will land adds to the suspense. In the end, Mr. Imus might do some damage to his former employers at NBC, but he is also likely to land some jabs inside the halls of Fox. Friendly fire, after all, is part of the proven formula.

On Monday morning, Mr. Imus referred to his guest, regular Fox News pundit Monica Crowley, as a “requisite right-wing nut.” He said that over the weekend, he was planning on watching Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, but then realized that they had nobody important on. He joked that he was going to kill Sean Hannity’s kid’s puppy for losing a tennis tournament that Mr. Imus had bet money on. And he suggested, a couple times throughout the morning that Neil Cavuto, a top executive at FBN, was off taking a nap.

Whatever the short term complications, Mr. Imus’ arrival is likely to help FBN extend its distribution around the country. Until recently, Imus in the Morning was simulcast on RFD-TV—a cable network, based in Omaha, Neb., which serves “the needs and interests of rural America.” The partnership, which was recently aborted so that Mr. Imus could join FBN, was originally supposed to last several more years. Recently, Patrick Gottsch, the head of RFD, told The Observer that with Mr. Imus’ help, his media company had achieved in 18 months what it had hoped to achieve in five years—namely, increasing its national distribution by more than 10 million households.

Despite the expansion, however, ratings for Imus were lackluster on RFD-TV. According to the Nielsen Company, during August 2009, Imus in the Morning averaged a mere 31,000 households. Mr. Gottsch acknowledged that as good as the simulcast was for RFD, it was never the perfect fit for Mr. Imus. “Quite frankly, I think we were holding Don back,” said Mr. Gottsch. “We get it. The move is good for everybody involved. It’s a better deal for Don. I’m sure it’s going to be a win for Fox.”

Mr. Gottsch pointed out that Fox Business is in position strangely similar—if diametrically opposed—to the one RFD-TV was in when he originally signed up Imus. Whereas RFD had a strong rural distribution and was looking to break into urban markets, Fox Business currently has a strong urban presence and is looking to expand into the heartland. In both cases, having Mr. Imus in the lineup gives executives a strong bargaining chip with cable operators around the country.

“For most people, FBN simply doesn’t exist right now,” said Mr. Barnhart. “The I-man, right there, is a huge boost for FBN. For many households, this is going to literally put that channel on the map”.

“You got to call your cable company,” Mr. Imus told his radio audience on Monday morning. “Get this thing hooked up, baby.”

fgillette@observer.com