Paybacks are a…

The New York Observer’s Felix Gillette writes about Don Imus’ first day inside the News Corp. building…

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.

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