-Caveat Lector- http://www.media-alliance.org/mediafile/20-1/bet.html
MEDIAFile Volume 20 #1 January / February 2001 The End Of Black Entertainment Television by Yemi Toure The funeral procession turned into the cemetery on November 3. That was the day Black ownership of media giant Black Entertainment Television was buried in a graveyard named "Formerly Black- Owned." BET ownership will be interred next to Pro-Line hair products, U.S. Radio Network, blackvoices.com, Black savings and loans, nearly half of Essence magazine, and Black- owned farmland. With the sad passing of BET, the graveyard of Black ownership is getting full. For BET--in Black hands for 20 years--it did not have to end this way. Another huge Black media firm has resisted White takeover and remains bigger than BET. What happened with BET? Media conglomerate Viacom, which already owns CBS, MTV, UPN, and Paramount Pictures, stood at the cemetery gate and was handed the ownership papers--and all those booty-shaking videos--by BET chairman Robert Johnson. What does it mean? George Curry, head of the American Society of Magazine Editors and former editor of Emerge newsmagazine, says, "You can have all the well-meaning people at Viacom that you can collect, yet they do not and cannot have what is a unique African- American perspective . . . BET, as we know it, is dead." Now that BET is gone, what will Bob Johnson's legacy be? What will historians say, as they review all those videos? Bob Johnson did not know posterity. He knew posterior. Why Viacom Bought BET If you believe Viacom's press releases, they bought BET out of the goodness of their hearts, to improve BET's programming and to pay down BET's debts. They did it so little Black children can sleep better at night. Truth is, White companies are eyeing the growing Black economy, but many can't figure out how to take control of it by themselves. So they hunt for Black fronts to do it for them. "These large conglomerates are essentially buying access to markets they have long ignored," says Ken Smikle of Target Market News, a Black market research firm. Look at what Don Logan, chairman of Time, Inc., had to say about the June 28, 2000, purchase of one half of Essence Communications by his firm: "Time Inc.'s relationship with Essence will facilitate the entry or expansion of other AOL Time Warner divisions in the African-American market." Of the BET purchase, financial analyst Gordon Hodge of Thomas Weisel Partners says, "Viacom is an advertising and selling machine, and plugging . . . BET into that machine could presumably generate some attractive revenue opportunities." Will Other Black Voices Replace BET? Remember in elementary school, when you had an argument with little Bobby Johnson in English class, and the two of you agreed to duke it out behind the gym after school? But then, when school let out, Bobby showed up with Lester, the school bully? A similar uphill fight is now in front of music entrepreneur Quincy Jones. His NU-VUE cable operation was itching to go toe-to-toe with BET. But Bob Johnson turned up with Lester Viacom. Viacom can latch an economic vise on the Black community by offering huge discounts to subscribers and selling ads cheap. Suddenly, competition among Black cable programmers is no longer a level playing field, and Quincy Jones is probably going to get squeezed out of the market before he even gets started. Says Tim Jones, reporter for the Chicago Tribune, "The future of Black-owned media is unclear because, analysts say, ever-growing companies like Viacom will make it more difficult for challengers to effectively compete." A Lack of Diversity in Voices As competition shrivels up on the business side, it does so on the journalistic side also. Remember BET talk show host Tavis Smiley's boycott of the computer retail chain CompUSA? I can't recall Viacom winning any awards recently for diversity, but will Smiley seat a critic of Viacom at that table of his? Will he do a hard-hitting report on Viacom's UPN over its demeaning Black shows? Smiley's big public voice, which spoke up for us on so many issues, has now been effectively silenced when it comes to the hiring record or content offerings of all the media firms owned by Viacom, including CBS, UPN, Paramount Pictures, MTV, VH1, and Nickelodeon. Now if Black women come to Smiley to complain about the glass ceiling at Viacom, all he can do is let out one of those big laughs of his and tell them they have to take their complaints somewhere else. Says Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, "We are now seeing the dominance of a handful of companies controlling information and how that information reaches people. Unless action is taken to ensure journalistic independence, we face a dangerous threat to media diversity." According to Larry Irving, the Black assistant secretary of Commerce and head of the department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Black media ownership is "melting away. . . .We need a renewed public examination and debate about the merits of minority ownership and diversity of voice in the media." What About the Black Workers? Bob Johnson and BET President Debra Lee got five-year contracts with Viacom, but almost nothing has been said about the approximately 500 other BET employees. When larger firms buy up smaller firms in their market, the usual fallout is huge layoffs of redundant employees. If I were working behind the camera at BET, I would really be worried about getting a pink surprise in my pay packet around the holiday season. This would be especially true if I worked for the BET restaurants, magazines, pay-per-view channel, or film studios. These money-losing operations were not part of the Viacom deal. On the other hand, Johnson had fought vigorously against unions at BET for 20 years. But Viacom operates its entertainment shops by union rules. We assume it will extend the same terms to BET employees. Bob Johnson should hang his head in shame that his former employees have to look to a White company to get a fair deal for the first time. (For details see: www.afrikan.net/hype/ labor.html.) What Viacom Really Thinks of Johnson Bob Johnson is very rich. He boasts that Bill Gates takes his phone calls. He is a savvy businessperson who gets invited to the White House. He is a recognized power player in the media world, and now the second-largest individual stockholder in Viacom. Johnson even says he is a good friend of Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone. But did he get a seat on the Viacom board of directors? No. When asked about this, Viacom President Mel Karmazin says, ". . . there are already 18 board members and there is no more room at the table." What? No more room at the table? So, buy a bigger table! Unless there is something going on that we don't know about, under the table. Quality of Programming I am no fan of BET programming and have jammed BET all along, even before this merger. I once wrote that BET got where it is partly "by pushing the predominant image of Black males as thugs who only care about heartless sex and Rolex watches, and the predominant image of Black females as brainless, and best known for shaking their behinds." So, can we expect an improvement in BET programming now? Neither CBS, MTV, nor UPN--all Viacom owned--has an admirable track record on Black programming. CBS News might feed a news segment or two to BET to boost its news operation--but has CBS News done great by us in the past? Even the conservative NAACP claims that after one year of pushing for better treatment from Hollywood, the networks are still performing poorly. And don't forget that Viacom was the company that took New York Undercover and Living Single off the air--the two most popular TV shows in the Black community. Not a good sign. But let's give Viacom the benefit of the doubt and assume that programming will improve. What is that saying? That White folks will produce higher quality programming for Black folks than Black folks produce for themselves? Tsk, tsk, tsk! Don't tell me dollars will make the difference--low budget does not mean poor taste. The bottom line is, Viacom does not bring much quality to the table, and its economic domination of the Black market will prevent others from doing so. Recycling Black Dollars When my children were preteens, sometimes on weekends I would say to them, "Let's go spend some money with some Black folks!" We would pile into the Honda and hit the Black- owned bank, bookstore, market, and clothing store; we'd buy the Final Call newspaper from the Muslim brother on the corner; and we'd end up eating at a Black-owned restaurant. We believed in recycling Black dollars. We now have to wonder what happens to our Black dollars if we spend them with advertisers on BET, because the only way this deal makes sense is if a lot of Black dollars leave our community and go straight to Viacom. So, if you ever hear Bob Johnson say, "Black folks need to take control of their economic destiny," cuss him out. Sale or Sell-Out? Bob Johnson claims that the sale of BET was inevitable, that a "natural progression" of market forces drove the deal. He should have taken a lesson from John H. Johnson, owner of Johnson Publishing Co. (JPC), another Black-owned, privately held media company, which publishes Ebony and Jet magazines. White firms have been salivating over JPC for decades, but John H. Johnson has not sold out. Is it that JPC is too small to be bothered with? No. JPC is larger than BET--it is the largest Black-owned private company in the United States. John H. Johnson has resisted offers to sell his company to Whites because he has a greater vision and a stronger sense of the importance of Black ownership. He also has more of a sense of legacy--he has trained his daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, to run the business. She is president and chief operating officer of the empire, set to take over when the old man dies. When Bob Johnson's daughter, now in the 9th grade, gets older, can he tell her to prepare to run his empire? No. But he can help her fill out a job application. As Bob Johnson told the Washington Post: "What are my responsibilities to Black people at large? If I help my family get over and deal with the problems they might confront, then I have achieved that one goal that is my responsibility to society at large." When Bob Johnson opens up a future issue of Black Enterprise magazine and sees BET no longer listed under the famous and influential "BE 100" list of the largest Black firms, will he feel anything? Probably not. But I will. And I suspect that most Black folks will. We will feel that one more piece of Black history and Black independence and economic control has been lost. Jesse Jackson applauded the sell-out, calling it a "sell up." Wait a minute. Jesse, didn't I hear you, just yesterday, talking about how the U.S. Black economy is more than $500 billion strong, and how we need to do all we can to take control, maintain, and expand it? Jesse, what day of the week is this? I am reminded of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, massacre of 1921, when 35 blocks of the city's Black business district were destroyed by rioting White citizens and officials. The fires wiped out what Booker T. Washington called "the Negro Wall Street." Today, they don't come with flames, they come with dollars, and our leaders walk straight into economic hell and expect us to follow. The Last, Green Mile When the BET-Viacom deal is finalized early this year, the last pile of dirt will have been placed on the grave of BET's independence. The Christian Bible says that without vision, the people perish. BET has been looking down at its bottom line so much, it never looked up to see the noose swinging above its head. Index �1998-2001 Media Alliance. Copyright reverts to authors and photographers after publication on our website. Editorial Team: Andrea Buffa, Ben Clarke, Editing & Design: Ben Clarke Comments and questions to:mediafile@media- alliance.org <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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