Bernard McGuirk, a New York radio fixture who, as the on-air foil of the so-called shock jock Don Imus, helped incite a furor when the two men demeaned the Rutgers women’s basketball team in a racist, misogynistic exchange that marred, but only briefly disrupted, both of their careers, died on Oct. 5. He was 64.
The death was announced by WABC, the AM station where Mr. McGuirk was a co-host of a popular morning program until shortly before he died. The cause was prostate cancer, the station said. It did not specify where he died. He lived in Lido Beach, N.Y., on Long Island.
After decades at Mr. Imus’s side, Mr. McGuirk took over his drive-time slot on WABC in 2018 as one half of “Bernie & Sid in the Morning,” with Sid Rosenberg. To the broader public, though, he was probably better known for the events of April 4, 2007.
By then Mr. McGuirk had worked on “Imus in the Morning” for 20 years. Bantering with the host and the newsman Charles McCord, he played an integral part in turning the show into a nationally syndicated juggernaut, with millions of listeners on dozens of stations and hundreds of thousands of cable television viewers, all drawn by a high-low mix of political talk, author interviews, news updates and crude jokes.
On the morning in question, during a discussion of the University of Tennessee’s win over the Rutgers squad’s largely Black lineup in the N.C.A.A. title game the previous night, Mr. Imus interjected.
“That’s some rough girls from Rutgers,” he said. “They got tattoos and —”
“Some hard-core ho’s,” Mr. McGuirk responded.
“That’s some nappy-headed ho’s there,” Mr. Imus went on, chuckling.
Mr. McGuirk then cited a “Jiggaboos versus the Wannabes” story line from the Spike Lee film “School Daze.”
It did not take long for the exchange to rocket around the internet. Mr. Imus initially tried to play down the accusations of racism. He soon admitted, however, that even for a show whose humor was often meant to offend, the remarks had gone “way too far.”
Accusations that he was a racist were not new. The CBS news program “60 Minutes” reported in 1998 that, using a common slur, Mr. Imus had told one of its producers that Mr. McGuirk’s job was to make offensive jokes about Black people. Mr. McGuirk denied it. “I’m not a bigot,” he told The New York Times in 2000.
Mr. Imus had defused similar situations in the past by apologizing. Not this time.
Black organizations, women’s groups and employees of the companies that broadcast “Imus in the Morning” — CBS on radio; MSNBC on cable TV — called for both men to be punished. Advertisers pulled out. Many listeners stood by Mr. Imus and Mr. McGuirk; many high-profile guests did not.
The show, which originated on WFAN in New York, was soon canceled, and CBS fired both men. Mr. McGuirk subsequently addressed the matter in an interview on the Fox News program “Hannity & Colmes.”
He apologized to the Rutgers players and said that if anyone had made such comments about his daughter, “I’d kick their teeth in.” But he also sought to justify the exchange, saying it was in sync with the tenor of the show.
“We dwell in a world of comedy, ridicule,” Mr. McGuirk said in the interview. He also said that some of the offensive language at issue “derives from the hip-hop community, and we appropriated it.”
And, as he had on other occasions, he cited his background as a further defense.
“I came from the streets myself,” he said.
Bernard Joseph McGuirk Jr. was born in the Bronx on Oct. 26, 1957. His father, a bus driver, and his mother, Patricia (Cunningham) McGuirk, were Irish immigrants.
Bernard Jr. grew up in a public housing complex in the South Bronx. The family later moved to Yonkers, N.Y. A onetime altar boy, he graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx.
After a few idle years, he entered the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx, driving a cab to pay his tuition. He earned a degree in communications in 1984.
During an “Imus in the Morning” simulcast on C-SPAN in 2000, Mr. McGuirk told Brian Lamb, his interviewer, that listening to the radio as a cabdriver had made him consider it as a career.
“It seemed like it was an easy racket,” he joked.
His first step was an internship at WNBC-AM, the radio station where Mr. Imus was working then. His first day was memorable, as he recounted in chatting with Mr. Imus on the host’s last day on the air on WABC in 2018.
“The I-Man,” Mr. McGuirk said, referring to Mr. Imus, “was rampaging up and down the station just wearing a bathrobe, screaming and cursing at the top of his lungs. And, I’m like, ‘Wow this is going to be fun.’”
When Mr. Imus’s producer broke a leg, Mr. McGuirk said in the C-SPAN interview, someone else had to fetch Mr. Imus coffee.
“They paid me something like $10 an hour to do it — my first paying job ever in the business,” he said.
Soon he was acting as a liaison with the traffic reporter and handling other tasks. Next came on-air bits doing impressions, of boxers and others, that were heavy on exaggerated ethnic accents and slang. He became a producer of “Imus in the Morning” in 1987 and later executive producer.
Around the time of the Persian Gulf war, “Imus in the Morning” began to shift from a traditional music-based AM program to a more news-driven one. It became a magnet for politicians, journalists, historians and others eager to appear before Mr. Imus’s growing national audience.
Michael Harrison, the founder and publisher of the talk-radio trade publication Talkers, said in an interview that Mr. McGuirk deserved a good deal of credit for the transformation.
“He was such a smart guy, and so diverse in his intellectual interests and his perspectives that he had a major impact on guiding Imus through the tricky work of doing a show like that on a big stage,” Mr. Harrison said.
For Mr. McGuirk, the fallout of the Rutgers remarks went beyond his firing: A scheduled audition for a host job at a Boston station in May 2007 was canceled in the face of public pressure.
Then, in December 2007, just eight months after being dismissed, he was back on the air with Mr. Imus, under a contract with Citadel Radio. The show appeared on WABC and dozens of radio affiliates, and it was simulcast on cable television, first on RFD-TV and then later on Fox Business Network, until Mr. Imus’s retirement in 2018. (He died in 2019.)
Mr. McGuirk’s survivors include his wife, Carol (Petrovich) McGuirk, whom he married in 1990; a son, Brendan; and a daughter, Melanie.
When Mr. Imus returned to the radio after his forced hiatus, he hired two Black comedians to try to inoculate the show against further accusations of racism.
One of the comedians, Karith Foster, left about two years into a three-year contract. She said in an interview that her experience on the program had been mixed, largely because of Mr. Imus’s abrupt mood swings and his view that she did not “make enough fun of Black people.”
Mr. McGuirk had “always been kind to me” and “had my back,” said Ms. Foster, who runs a corporate diversity consulting firm, Inversity. As for his part in the Rutgers exchange, she chalked it up, as he had insisted, to his “being true to his roots” as a “Bronx boy.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
