Boyce Watkins recently posted a piece where he laments over the news that JP Morgan Chase bought a significant piece of Johnson Publishing Company. Throughout his piece he paints this picture of big and crafty White corporations who are just waiting in the wings to take over Black media outlets.
While I get his general point about how we as Blacks have to stop this trend of giving away the farm, he is way off when he suggests that White ownership eventually corrupts these media outlets. Allow me to give you 3 examples.
It was under Bob Johnson’s leadership of BET that the decision was made to switch to raunchy hip hop videos. That genre blew up and was a ratings success amongst younger Blacks. Once BET was sold to Viacom, they simply built on that success.
Mediatakeout.com (the site that I have yet to see any Black commentator criticize) peddles the same mess that people like Watkins accuses BET of peddling. Both the founder and owner of this site is a Black man. This site also happens to be one of the most visited in the Black community.
This third example involves a site that I am going keep nameless due to the fact that I know some very good people personally who were once involved with this organization. Let’s just say that this site is probably about a click or two under mediatakeout.com. When this site was first introduced, this individual did all he could within his power to kept the site free from all the ratchetness that has made hip hop infamous. His boss (another Black individual who is also the owner of the site) did not like his approach because it affected the bottom line of the entire website. Finally, this brutha could not take it anymore, so he left. Today, that site is doing very well with traffic in part because of the ratchetness.
This is why I get so annoyed when I hear people like Watkins lamenting over some grand White conspiracy to dumb down Black folks by taking over our media.
How about taking a closer look at the media that we control?
The white shadow is not our problem
by Duane on July 12th, 2011 at 7:10 amBoyce Watkins recently posted a piece where he laments over the news that JP Morgan Chase bought a significant piece of Johnson Publishing Company. Throughout his piece he paints this picture of big and crafty White corporations who are just waiting in the wings to take over Black media outlets.
While I get his general point about how we as Blacks have to stop this trend of giving away the farm, he is way off when he suggests that White ownership eventually corrupts these media outlets. Allow me to give you 3 examples.
It was under Bob Johnson’s leadership of BET that the decision was made to switch to raunchy hip hop videos. That genre blew up and was a ratings success amongst younger Blacks. Once BET was sold to Viacom, they simply built on that success.
Mediatakeout.com (the site that I have yet to see any Black commentator criticize) peddles the same mess that people like Watkins accuses BET of peddling. Both the founder and owner of this site is a Black man. This site also happens to be one of the most visited in the Black community.
This third example involves a site that I am going keep nameless due to the fact that I know some very good people personally who were once involved with this organization. Let’s just say that this site is probably about a click or two under mediatakeout.com. When this site was first introduced, this individual did all he could within his power to kept the site free from all the ratchetness that has made hip hop infamous. His boss (another Black individual who is also the owner of the site) did not like his approach because it affected the bottom line of the entire website. Finally, this brutha could not take it anymore, so he left. Today, that site is doing very well with traffic in part because of the ratchetness.
This is why I get so annoyed when I hear people like Watkins lamenting over some grand White conspiracy to dumb down Black folks by taking over our media.
How about taking a closer look at the media that we control?