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By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
News has surfaced that powerful members of the Congressional Black Caucus are asking for a bailout of minority broadcasters, specifically black radio. But black radio, like the rest of commercial media, has long dodged any hint of the public service obligations to which it is legally bound. Is the crisis of black radio a chance to finally impose real public service obligations upon broadcasters?
Our thanks to Davey D for this video…
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A Federal Bailout For Black Radio? Under What Conditions?
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
There’s a hilarious Direct TV commercial which takes place in the boardroom of a giant cable TV corporation. The not-too-bright suits at the table acknowledge that Direct TV is killing them, but one has a solution. “Two words,” he says. “Federal. Bailout. Read a paper. Everybody’s doing it.” They all concur and nod in unison. A May 19 article in The Hill by Silla Brush confirms that reality has overtaken satire.
High-ranking House Democrats are urging the Treasury Department to prop up minority-owned broadcasters suffering from a lack of capital and lost advertising revenue amid the economic slump.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) is leading an effort to convince Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to take “decisive action” by extending credit to this sector of the broadcasting industry.
Clyburn and other senior members, including House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), argue that minority-owned broadcasters are sound businesses, but that the recession could undermine the government’s efforts to diversify the airwaves.
A number of members from the Congressional Black Caucus signed the letter, too.
So nobody is laughing. One of the most powerful congressmen on Capitol Hill wants bailout money allocated to black radio. Why? To start with, Radio One and the other leading African American owned broadcasters are pitifully small compared to Clear Channel, CBS and the big boys. Black radio is indeed suffering, and the reasons have nothing to do with the so-called “free market.”
“Free markets,” in fact, have never had anything to do with how the U.S. broadcast industry operates. The broadcast airwaves were not invented by some smart engineer or clever entrepreneur, they are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, along with gamma radiation and sunshine. The radio-TV broadcast spectrum is thus a limited public resource. Broadcast licenses are monopoly licenses awarded by the government to a select few wealthy individuals and corporations from which those wealthy few reap tens of billions in annual profits. Though licenses are supposedly awarded on the condition that broadcasters operate in the public interest, no broadcaster in U.S. history has ever had a license revoked for flunking this test.
If a public interest test for broadcast licensees were ever administered, few if any commercial broadcasters would pass. That certainly includes black radio. Where a generation ago black radio deployed local news gathering organizations in dozens of cities across the country, with black journalists ferreting out local news, there is not a single urban radio station standing with a news gathering operation. Journalism on black radio has been dead so long that no adults under 45 can recall what it looked or sounded like. The premiere black-owned radio chain, Radio One pioneered the cutting of newsrooms and their replacement with cheaper and more profitable talk shows, mostly about celebrities and relationships.
It’s not as if black owned radio stations manage to serve the public on the artistic end either. As Davey D points out on Jared Ball’s Jazz And Justice, the playlists for white owned stations aiming their programming at black audiences are the same as Radio One’s. The corrupt regime of payola rules the airwaves on black owned stations, just as it does on white ones, depriving audiences of the opportunity to hear newer and local artists. A recent study by the Future of Music Coalition indicated that up to half the songs played on the top four radio chains are oldies. Radio One was not among the chains audited, but their playlists differ in no other discernible ways from their white owned competitors.
HR 848, the so-called performance rights legislation will doubtless further disadvantage black radio station owners because it will, in effect, legalize payola, and give the biggest chains more leverage in dealing with labels than smaller ones. Under HR 848 as presently written major chains like Clear Channel will be able, as Davey D points out, to cut deals with labels that ban airplay on competing stations. Radio One founder Cathy Hughes may not be entirely wrong when she predicts the end of commercial black radio.
Still it is impossible to justify a federal bailout of any commercial broadcaster when none of the commercial broadcasters are honoring their public service obligations. News departments on black and white radio, and on TV for that matter were dumped because, as Dr. Robet McChesney has pointed out for about a decade, entertainment is more profitable than news.
The crisis of black radio is an opportunity for African American communities, and for all Americans. It’s one of our best, and maybe one of our last chances to impose stiff news and public service requirements upon broadcasters, requirements that they have successfully evaded since the FCC was founded more than seventy years ago. If leading House Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus are really interested in reviving and revitalizing the institution of black radio, they need to lead and participate in a public discussion of how news coverage affects communities, how payola shuts down the careers of local artists, and what the public service obligations of broadcasters really should be.
Since radio broadcasting has never been and never will be a “free market” and the principle is well established in law that broadcasters hold their licenses on the condition of public service, the arguments about government “not picking winners” are just nonsense designed to protect the ill-gotten and irresponsible gains of those who run our airwaves for their private profit today. If a bailout of broadcasters is contemplated, there must be congressional hearings that explore what the public service obligations of broadcasters are, and stiff measures instituted to strip the licenses of those who fail to meet them. Should every station with gross revenue of say, $1.2 million annually be required to field a news department covering school boards, local issues and local politics? Should stations be required to play new and local artists in every market? What rights will the public have to police and enforce the service requirements of broadcasters?
If members of the Congressional Black Caucus are serious about saving black radio, they will need public support. They won’t get and don’t deserve it without a public discussion, without hearings in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia. Before any bailout of broadcasters, black or otherwise is contemplated, we have to have this conversation. BAR reached out to the office of Congressman Clyburn early this week and received no response. We will continue to call Rep. Clyburn’s office on this subject.
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Every Monday afternoon at 1PM on WPFW, Baltimore-DC listeners can hear a fine example of The Other Black Radio — Jared Ball’s Jazz and Justice. This week the first hour featured HipHop historian, producer and entrepreneur Davey D, Black Agenda Report’s Bruce Dixon and longtime radio analyst Paul Porter, now of Industry Ears discussing the state of commercial black radio, and whether it’s worth saving.
Tap the flash player below to listen to or the mic to download the show. About 60 minutes, and worth it.
Find more of Dr. Jared Ball’s work at voxunion.com. The latest headlines from voxunion.com are always available right here in the right hand margin of BAR’s front page.
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by BAR Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon
When the Tom Joyner Morning Show was pulled first from Chicago, and then from other markets early this month, Joyner counseled listeners that "…black radio will never be what it once was, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it." This message of powerlessness and permanent defeat, of resignation to someone else owning and controlling the black conversation may be all we can expect from Joyner and the rest of the black elite. But is it the real answer? Does it even address the crucial question of how we might have and our own black civic conversation?
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Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, Tavis Smiley, and the Impoverishment of Black Media
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
“The cancellation provoked outrage among fans because the Tom Joyner Morning Show is about as good as commercial black radio is allowed to get nowadays.”
‘The bottom line,” radio fly-jock Tom Joyner told fans in his blog, “is that black radio will never be what it once was, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.” Joyner tried to put the yanking of his show by Clear Channel into perspective for fans, who deluged his blog and email with expressions of support, and even talk of consumer boycotts. Joyner discouraged boycott chatter, and like Steve Harvey, who seems likely to replace him on many Clear Channel outlets, declared it was all “just business.”
The cancellation provoked outrage among fans because the Tom Joyner Morning Show is about as good as commercial black radio is allowed to get nowadays. Despite the show’s limited playlist of corporate-approved music and periodic descents into minstrelsy, Joyner regularly set aside a small amount of time for commentary, issues and appeals addressed to African Americans as a community. It was never much time, and the issues, the commentary were relatively safe stuff on the whole. But to the news-starved audience of black commercial radio, Tom Joyner, like his colleague Tavis Smiley, stand out like rare gulps of fresh air.
But sustaining the life of a community takes more than an occasional breath. Community and democracy demand a steady diet of news to fuel civic engagement and public conversation in the public interest.
As BAR’s Glen Ford pointed out all of six years ago in ‘
Who Killed Black Radio News,” the owners of commercial black media have for a generation enforced a no-news policy, justifying it with the unsupportable claim that all black people want is to be entertained." The fact is that news is less profitable than 100% entertainment. PR firms and the celebrity industries provide their own “news” releases complete with commercial tie-ins, and already segmented to the age and income divided groups that marketers love. Black radio owners decided not to do news because corporate media has consciously decided not to recognize African Americans as a people or a polity with our own set of collective experience and political will. In a media regime that lives and dies by advertising alone, black commercial radio will only recognize black communities as marketing contraptions, as audience segments whose ears and eyeballs it can deliver to sponsors. The owners and managers of commercial black radio and TV are
not the least concerned about our past or future, our housing or health care crises, the black imprisonment rate or the digital divide or the education of our young or the dignified security of our elderly. To them we are just a market, passive consumers to be sliced and diced according to marketing industry guidelines. A hip hop station, an oldies station, an easy listening urban station, a gospel station, all under the same ownership with no news on any of them, forever and ever, amen. If this is what Joyner meant, and we think it was, when he described the current state of black commercial radio, he was right. Except the “forever’ part. Except when he told fans ‘…there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”
Commercial black radio and TV have not always been hostile to and incompatible with journalism. There was a brief period, back in the early and mid 1970s when journalism flourished on commercial black radio. Local teams of African American journalists competed with each other to report and package non-entertainment news directed at black communities. News gathering and reporting operations on commercial black radio played a key role in the black conversation, enabling African American communities to define themselves as more than passive masses of consumers and voters. They heyday of black broadcast journalism didn’t last long. News was never as profitable as entertainment, and as limits on how many stations one owner could have were removed, owners borrowed heavily to get more stations, and cut costs to reward themselves and repay the loans. News was the first casualty, reported Glen Ford six years ago.
There need not have been a contradiction between Black ownership and community access, including the maintenance of quality news operations. In a betrayal that, we believe, has been a major factor in the relentless decline of Black political power, many Black radio owners have adopted business plans identical to their white corporate peers.
Such is certainly the case with Radio One. "The company’s voraciousness mirrored the consolidation throughout the radio industry after rules limiting the number of stations one company could own nationally were lifted in 1996," wrote the Washington Post, in a February 5, 2003 showcase article. Radio One boasts a 60-person research department that "randomly calls thousands of people and conducts 20-minute surveys of those who tune in to its radio stations." Do the people want news? The subject isn’t broached by either Post reporter Krissah Williams or her main interlocutor, Radio One Chief Operating Officer Mary Catherine Sneed. Instead, the conversation is all about the sales value of entertainment programming. "If you’re not [at parties, clubs and grass-roots events], you’ll never be a big personality in the community," Sneed said. "Those are the things that separate stations from one another."
News isn’t even on the radar screen. Indeed, so insidiously have disc jockey patter and the talk show format been substituted for news that large segments of the Black public may no longer know the difference.
“Reclaiming commercial black radio would mean rediscovering the Freedom Movement’s traditions of disrespect for illegitimate authority.”
It may be that way now, but it doesn’t have to be. Contrary to Joyner’s wisdom, there’s plenty that African American communities can do to influence the behavior of commercial black radio. But seeing the way forward, much less actually organizing it, requires thinking well outside the boxes that the black misleadership class, of which Joyner and Tavis are a part, are used to drawing for themselves and for us. Today’s black notables are too respectful of illegitimate authority, too preoccupied with their own careers, too deferential to corporate power to acknowledge the true dimensions of the crisis, or help us solve it.
Reclaiming commercial black radio would mean rediscovering the Freedom Movement’s traditions of disrespect for illegitimate authority. It would mean confronting the white and black absentee owners of corporate black radio and TV, like Clear Channel and Radio One at their own public events, like live remotes, and demanding news for the people. It would mean mobilizing people from black journalism schools and black communities to demand the reanimation of black journalism. It would mean insisting on the establishment of local news gathering operations at black radio and TV stations as a condition of the continued good will of audiences toward their owners and advertisers. That is a tall order, well outside the vision of a Tom Joyner or even of a Tavis Smiley, who sometimes pretends to be a journalist.
Leadership is seeing a way where the wise and informed tell you there is no way, and organizing people to take that way. Neither of these guys is in the leadership business. Joyner and Smiley are in the business of marketing, assembling ears and eyeballs for delivery to sponsors. In Tavis’s case, those sponsors include Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, two of the nation’s biggest and most notoriously low-wage employers, along with payday loan and housing bubble profiteers Wells Fargo and Bank of America. This seriously limits the problems one can mention on the air, let alone the solutions.
Media are the circulatory systems of modern societies. Mass media can empower us. They can enable us to carry on our conversation about what we expect from society and from each other. Or mass media can distort our public conversations and our private lives, instilling anti-cooperative and antisocial values in young and old alike. Look at BET.
African American communities are not the only ones that suffer from the slow death of journalism. Civic engagement in the larger American polity is withering too, and for the same reason. Newspapers are folding not because they are unprofitable, but because even after cutting actual journalism to the bone, they don’t bring in the fifteen and twenty percent returns that the bubble economy has accustomed investors to. A well-run newspaper can consistently bring in a seven to nine percent annual return on investment, which in pre-bubble days was considered just fine. The very few newspaper corporations that remained family owned, or that went nonprofit are doing journalism as well as ever.
Forty-some years ago, Dr. Martin Luther wondered aloud that all his life’s work might have been the integration of African Americans into a burning house. King answered his own question by declaring that if that was the case, we would have to be the firefighters, not just for ourselves, but for the whole American polity. If the demand for news, news for the people, is ever to be raised inside corporate boardrooms and in the street at live remotes, it will happen first in African American communities. Or maybe not at all. There is no legal road to this. It can only be done by confronting owners of commercial black media and making the price of a no-news regime too costly for them.
We can be firefighters, struggling for a democratic, responsible media, trying to reanimate old and configure new models of journalism for our own and the larger American community. We can disregard Joyner’s advice, and struggle to free the black conversation from corporate gatekeepers who would monetize, militarize and privatize it. Or we can burn with the rest. And watch
Black Evil Television.
