Rev. Al Sharpton, center, gestures toward Linzell Vaughn, left, father of Rutgers sophomore basketball center Kia Vaughn outside CBS headquarters in New York yesterday.

AP / RICHARD DREW

Oprah didn’t ask the one question I wanted to hear.

“What’s on your iPod?”

That’s what I hoped she’d ask the members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, who appeared on her show yesterday afternoon, less than an hour before CBS announced that it was firing the highly popular and highly controversial — the two go hand-in-hand — Don Imus, who last week referred to the Rutgers players as “nappy-headed hos.”

“There has been much discussion,” CBS president and CEO Les Moonves said yesterday in a statement explaining the network’s decision to fire Imus, “of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision.”

What I suspect weighed most heavily on the minds of CBS executives was the decision by skittish sponsors to drop Imus. Because, if it was his language and approach to “humor” that bothered the network suits, Imus would have been dumped long ago. Or, in this case, the day after he made his idiotic (as Imus himself later called them) and insensitive comments about Rutgers.

But what I’d like to know, what I wish Oprah had asked, is whether the young women on the Rutgers basketball team listen to the music of the likes of 50 Cent or 2-Pac, 40 Thevz or 2 Live Crew.

Rutgers coach Vivian Stringer called Imus’ remarks, which aired on his nationally syndicated show Thursday of last week, the day after the Scarlet Knights lost in the NCAA championship game to Tennessee, “racist and sexist” as well as “deplorable, despicable, and abominable.”

She’s absolutely right.

Those also are the sort of remarks that Imus has been making for years. Why these comments touched off a firestorm that resulted in his firing is, seemingly, because he directed them at a particular group of talented, hard-working young women.

In contrast to 50 Cent, or 2 Live Crew, or other “artists,” whose vulgar, misogynistic lyrics degrade, devalue, and debase all women.

This newspaper will not allow me to reprint the lyrics of songs such as 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” from his Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ album, or 2-Pac’s “Me and My Girlfriend,” or 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny,” or 40 Thevz’ “Slang Em on Ah Nigga,” from their Lef 4 Dead album.

If you want to read them, and countless others like them, you’ll have to go to the Internet. And then ask yourself, as Mr. Moonves did, “the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society.”

Suffice to say, what Imus said, while inexcusable, isn’t remotely as offensive.

“I said a stupid, idiotic thing that desperately hurt these kids,” Imus said yesterday morning on what has turned out to be his last show for CBS.

He has said stupid, idiotic, and hurtful things before and gotten away with them. They may even have enhanced his popularity.

Not this time.

Now he’s gone, and it’s time to go after others who say even worse things.

Why should Imus be a pariah, while the practitioners of “gangsta” rap — who glamorize violence, drugs, and casual sex, while disdaining the value of education and the virtue of civility toward their fellow men and women — be popular?

Now, we don’t know whether the young women who play basketball for Rutgers listen to Beethoven or the Beatles, Diana Ross or Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, or Dion and the Belmonts on their iPods. Or whether they listen to the likes of 50 Cent, 40 Thevz, 2 Live Crew or 2-Pac.

Oprah didn’t ask.

We do know that they didn’t listen to Imus. Several of the players admitted they’d never heard of him before his comments were brought to their attention. How many of those same players, do you suppose, would say they’ve never heard of Fifty Cent? Or listened to his lyrics?

And, if they have, why didn’t they find those lyrics “racist and sexist … deplorable, despicable, and abominable?”

Was it because they weren’t directed at them, specifically, but at all women? Is that supposedly less offensive and more acceptable?

Imus is gone. Now it’s time to go after other “entertainers” who, as Coach Stringer yesterday said of Imus, “defame” women.

“It is time,” Stringer said, “for us to take back moral issues and values.”

You go, girl!

Coach Stringer is on to something here. It is high time — indeed, well past time — we do exactly that. But winning the Imus issue was like a No. 1 seed beating a No. 16. Now it’s time to take on the big boyz. Time to go after the “gangstas,” since we’re finally focusing on “moral issues and values.”

Or don’t we care about “the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly women of color trying to make their way in this society?”

jdonalds@projo.com