Don Imus talks retirement, regrets and Howard Stern

Pioneering radio shock jock Don Imus, who announced in January he was retiring after five decades on the air after the March 29 edition of WABC-AM’s “Imus in the Morning” show, has expressed admiration for Howard Stern, with whom he has had a contentious professional relationship.

“I would put Stern in there” among the top five radio broadcasters, Imus, 77, says in a television interview scheduled to air this weekend on “CBS Sunday Morning.” The two had separate shows at WNBC-AM from 1982 to 1985, and were jointly promoted by the station with the marketing campaign “If We Weren’t So Bad, We Wouldn’t Be So Good.” Despite their rivalry, which included highly public feuds, Imus avers, “He had a big problem with me. I didn’t with him.”

Imus says he regrets the controversial incident in April 2007, when he used racist and sexist terms on air to describe Rutgers University’s mostly African-American women’s basketball team. MSNBC subsequently dropped his television program, and CBS his syndicated radio show.

“It did change my feeling about making fun of some people who didn’t deserve to be made fun of and didn’t have a mechanism to defend themselves,” he tells “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Of his broadcasting style, reflects Imus, who has been doing his show from his ranch in Texas, “I always had it in my head I was talkin’ to one person,” adding, “I felt that when I walked in there and sat down and turned the mic on that I was . . . talking to you. . . . I’m gonna miss that.”