Bring Back Black Radio News -- The People's Network

Bill Quigley

10 Jan 2007

🖨️ Print Article

By GLEN FORD, BAR Executive Editor

news u can use

The absence of news on commercial Black radio has stunted our dreams and warped our politics for a generation, leaving Black America with no means to talk to itself in its own voices. Sparking a movement in our communities to demand the return of news to the Black commercial airwaves, argues Glen Ford , must be at the center of any meaningful black push for media reform.

Bring Back Black Radio News: The People’s Network

by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford

“The people listen to commercial Black radio, and the struggle must be taken to the proprietors’ doorsteps.”

When 2,500 activists gather for the National Conference on Media Reform in Memphis, this weekend, one of the chief villains of the event will be Clear Channel, the media giant that has sucked up and dumbed down 1,200 commercial radio stations, the vast bulk of them in the decade since the U.S. Congress ushered in a corporate feeding frenzy with its Telecommunications Act of 1996. If past Media Reform conferences (2003 and 2005) are any guide, participants will – correctly – rail against the strangling grip of a corporate media oligarchy that manipulates and distorts the purchasing behavior, moral judgment and global worldview of the nation. We at Black Agenda Report fear, however, that the African American corporate players in the Great Media Rip-Off will largely get a free pass – while discussion of the Black commercial radio scene will, as usual, be limited to the general precariousness of (small) Black station ownership, and the poisonous nature of the musical menus beamed to the inner cities.

To be sure, activists and scholars will note the vast damage done to diversity in media programming and ownership by rampaging corporate consolidation. Yet few will call attention to the fact that Black corporate consolidators are as busily at work as their white counterparts, smothering the last vestiges of local Black radio news coverage. We can safely – and sadly – predict that there will be little discussion in Memphis of the specific path that consolidation has taken in African American radio markets, nor of the fracturing of previously progressive Black political institutions that has resulted from the near-extinction of local Black radio news.

“We fear that the African American corporate players in the Great Media Rip-Off will largely get a free pass.”

Last spring’s congressional passage of the telecom industry’s infamous COPE Act, which threatened to make the Internet a toll road and rolled back decades of hard-won minority victories over the cable giants, is sure to be a hot to pic in Memphis. But few will note that the Congressional Black Caucus, representing the most consistently progressive constituency in the United States, caved in shamelessly in the face of corporate power, casting two-thirds of its votes in favor of COPE – a higher percentage than House Democrats in general. And fewer still will make the connection between the shriveling of local Black radio news and the meltdown in Black electoral politics.

When progressives lump together the generalized effects of media consolidation – in effect saying: Well, the corporations are hurting everybody, so let’s all stick to the same page – they ignore the history that has created profound differences in the political and communications structures of Black and white America. Black commercial radio is THE primary communications system for African Americans, reaching more than 80 percent of Black households. Born in the throes of the Black Freedom Movement, commercial Black radio cannot be replaced by alternative information systems. So pervasive is Black radio’s reach and influence among African Americans, there is no choice but to organize massively to force corporations – including Black-owned corporations – to reinstate hourly, local Black news coverage.

No News – No Progress

If Dr. Martin Luther King had been allowed to live, he would have long ago mobilized to save local Black radio news from the dustbin into which it has been caste by white and Black corporate owners. In the days leading up to the Memphis Media Reform conference, Hip Hop broadcaster, journalist and historian Davey D has been circulating King’s 1967 speech to the National Association of Radio Announcers (the Black disc jockey’s organization of that era) in Atlanta:

“I value the special opportunity to address you this evening, for in my years of struggles both North and South, I have come to appreciate the role which the radio announcer plays in the life of our people. For better or worse, you are opinion makers in the community, and it is important that you remain aware of the power which is potential in your vocation.

“The masses are almost totally dependent on radio as their means of relating to the society at large. They do not read newspapers; television speaks not to their needs, but to upper middle class America.

“One need only recall the Watts tragedy and the quick adoption of the ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ slogan to [understand] the influence of the radio announcer in the community. But, while the establishment was quick to blame the tragedy of Watts, most unjustly, on the slogan of Magnificent Montague, it has not been ready to acknowledge all of the positive features that grow out of your contribution to the community.

“No one knows the importance of ‘Tall Pall’ White and the massive non-violent demonstrations of the youth of Birmingham in 1963; or the funds raised by Pervis Spann for the Mississippi Summer project of 1964; or the consistent fundraising and voter education done for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the civil rights movement by Georgie Woods, my good friend from Philadelphia.”

Dr. King was speaking of the Black masses’ total dependence on Black-oriented radio for information relevant to their struggle. After King’s death and the urban rebellions of 1968, news operations proliferated in the exploding Black radio market – a potent nutrient for the political forces bubbling from the ground up following the death of Jim Crow. Local Black radio news empowered these new forces, treating them as legitimate voices of the people – no matter what the white corporate media said. Vast cadres of activists became powerful political actors – made “authentic” by their recognition as “leaders” by local Black radio news staffs.

Local Black radio news was an indispensable ingredient in the formation of a progressive post-Sixties Black political class. It was a fountain of social democracy, focusing the spotlight (microphone) on groupings engaged in the transformation of a Jim Crow America to…something else. The early to mid-Seventies was the Golden Age of both local Black radio news and grassroots urban activism – an historical synergy. As I wrote in the May 29, 2003, edition of Black Commentator:

“In 1973, 21 reporters from three Black-oriented radio stations provided African Americans in Washington, DC a daily diet of news – hard, factual information vital to the material and political fortunes of the local community. The three stations – WOL-AM, WOOK-AM and WHUR-FM – their news staffs as fiercely competitive as their disc jockeys, vied for domination of the Black Washington market. Community activists and institutions demanded, expected, and received intense and sustained coverage of the fullest range of their activities.”

Even stations in small Black markets fielded at least one- or two-person news staffs, nurturing emerging political structures throughout Black America. But this “Golden Age” was not to last long.

It is vital to note that African American ownership of stations played a secondary role in the Seventies proliferation of local Black radio news. By 1976, according to the National Association of Black Broadcasters (NABOB), there were still only about 30 Black-owned radio outlets, far too few to significantly account for the explosion of inner-city electronic journalism. (In Washington, for example, only Howard University’s WHUR-FM was Black-owned.) However, African Americans almost universally believed that increased Black ownership would lead directly to qualitatively and quantitatively better radio service to the community.

How wrong we were.

The dependence on Black-formatted radio for information specifically relevant to African American life that Dr. King spoke of in 1967 continues to this day – but the masses have been placed on a starvation and narcotized diet. Black corporate media owners – the beneficiaries of a people’s aspirations and misplaced political capital – are among those who are force-feeding the population a news-less and often lyrically toxic broadcast mix.

“The masses have been placed on a starvation and narcotized diet.”

As in the general market, the gradual extinction of local Black news is a product of corporate consolidation of media. However, the repercussions are far more disastrous in Black America – and consequently, for the prospects of the nation as a whole – distorting political structures that were, in large part, made possible through the synergy of grassroots activism and local Black radio journalism. The “leadership-creating” mechanisms of a people have been short-circuited. For a progressive movement that is numerically at least half African American (see Bruce Dixon, “Where the Left Lives,” October 6, 2005), the prospects are dire, indeed. The co-sponsor of the telecom industry’s COPE Act, endorsed by two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus, was Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush – a former Black Panther! Chicago Black radio – as in most population centers – is virtually devoid of news, so who is to know what crimes are committed by the people’s “progressive” representatives?

If progressives permanently lose the Congressional Black Caucus as a reliable resistance to corporate rule, who can fill the vacuum? It is, of course, a rhetorical question. In the absence of direct action to reverse the near-extinction of local news via the broadcast format that exerts by far the most influence on African Americans – the group that is absolutely indispensable to any movement for social change – corporate America will inevitably triumph.

Black Corporate Power

Although Clear-Channel is the villain-of-choice at all media reform conferences, the biggest corporate footprint in African American radio, is Black. Radio One, with 69 stations in 22 of the top Black markets, geographically outweighs Clear-Channel, with 51 Black-oriented stations. But they have a critical element in common: neither provides local news. In political terms, they should be viewed as identical.

Yet most discussions of media reform simply decry the general distress among surviving (small) Black radio owners, while leaving blameless those Black corporate players that have benefited from consolidation – such as Radio One, whose star rose to mega-heights following passage of the corporate-written Telecommunications Act of 1996. "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 February 5, 2003. This, despite the general decline in minority owners’ fortunes. Or plausibly, because of it.

If there is to be effective action to bring back Black local radio news, it must take the form of an organizers movement, spearheaded by those groups that still labor in the trenches of social change in the various localities – grassroots organizations whose predecessors’ struggles, decades ago, were catapulted from the paper-flyer age into the mass broadcast arena, when news from a Black radio source was available to be acted upon by millions of people. The Internet will not suffice; neither will alternative broadcast forms, as valuable a contribution as these mediums represent. The people listen to commercial Black radio, and the struggle must be taken to the proprietors’ doorsteps – regardless of race. Indeed, it is most crucial that activists rid themselves of the atavistic, counterproductive urge to embrace Black corporations that commit the same anti-Black crimes as whites. Such behavior is rooted in Jim Crow yesterdays, unfit to confront today’s crises.

“The Internet will not suffice; neither will alternative broadcast forms.”

So long has it been since Black local radio news was a fixture of life, even activists who should know better fail to demand its reinstitution. New York City Councilman Charles Barron, a tireless fighter and former Black Panther, recently appeared on the venerable Gil Noble’s WABC-TV program “Like It Is” to protest the conversion of Black-owned WLIB-AM to an all-Gospel format. Barron and a fellow activist were insistent that the new WLIB provide “information” as well as music, but somehow could not “fix their lips” to utter the word “news.” Instead, they limited themselves to lobbying for the reinstatement of their favorite talk show hosts. Apparently, activists as well as radio audiences have forgotten that it is a regular diet of relevant local news, not subject to the whimsies of personality talk radio, that far more effectively empowers those who are engaged in the serious work of sustained social transformation in an electronic age.

The segmentation of radio – slicing it up into isolated demographics, sealed off from one another’s conversations – that is the hallmark of corporate consolidation, becomes even more destructive to the social fabric in the absence of regular news broadcasts. When massive immigrants rights demonstrations were held in Los Angeles and other cities last year, Black-oriented Emmis Communications station KKBT-FM “completely ignored one million people in the streets,” Davey D told this writer. It was “similar to the Million Man March right on their doorstep,” yet to KKBT and its listeners, it “didn’t exist.”

Without local news operations to keep highly segmented listening audiences aware of what the other “demos” are doing, there is little prospect of truly mass political action across lines of age and ethnicity. Substituting for news, Black-oriented radio offers celebrity crap. Davey D, again:

“Cam’ron wanted to ‘battle’ JZ and would come after him… Cam-ron put out a song, held a press conference, and everybody showed up, not just the entertainment media.

“I can go from New York to California, and everyone has an opinion on JZ vs. Cam’ron. But people don’t know about the Latino march – in a city that’s filled with racial conflict!”

People’s power can only trump corporate power when the people are enabled to learn of each other’s struggles and make decisions on whether commonality exists, or not. That’s a job for news operations that are in tune with the concerns of local communities. It is also the spirit of the founding Communications Act of 1934, which Black journalists and activists followed to its logical, empowering conclusion in the Seventies, until Black radio news was snuffed out by both Black and white corporate power.

What Is To Be Done?

We need clarity, and solidarity. The corporate stranglehold on Black radio’s potential value as a medium for social change can only be broken by organized communities willing to confront media owners, including owners of the same race. The history of Black radio is entwined with the Black Freedom Movement; therefore, the struggle to compel corporate owners to pay for and regularly schedule local news must be rooted in the same principles of popular democracy and self-determination. The folks with the most immediate stake in this project, are those who are already toiling in the vineyards: the activists who strain to serve their communities without benefit of finance and – because of the news “blackout” on Black radio – little means of outreach to the African American public or the larger society.

“Activists must overcome their hesitance to confront Black corporate media power.”

The long twilight of community struggle – the default assumption of Black “leadership” by corporate-sponsored Negroes, confused entertainers, and older Movement personalities who have extended their political lives by mastering the art of embracing the corporate camera – can only be ended by a frontal assault on the one community institution that reaches the vast majority of African Americans: commercial Black-oriented radio. Such an offensive requires political and media education within the activist community, so that they can begin to envision the contours of struggle in an environment of regular newscasts beaming from every Black-oriented station in their locality, reaching “the folks” in their cars and homes and streets. Radio stations are quite vulnerable to community pressure – they own little more than the good will of the public, a highly vulnerable commodity.

There is no fundamental problem in vilifying Clear-Channel and other white corporations. Black folks know they deserve it. However, activists must overcome their hesitance to confront Black corporate media power – and should have learned a lesson through long experience with Bob Johnson’s BET (he sold us out long before he sold his shares to Viacom). Black billionaires to not do a service to African Americans simply by virtue of their existence. The radio stations they own owe the community at least as much as their white corporate brethren do: they owe us news.

Solidarity

Solidarity demands that the same progressive forces that have brought together three Media Reform conferences – overwhelmingly white – bring to bear the resources African American activists lack, to assist in this confrontation with a corporate media that is destroying the structural fabric of the only reliably progressive polity in the U.S. – Black America.

“Black-oriented media is the most vulnerable to direct action and other forms of popular pressure.”

We are entering a new phase of struggle, one that should have arrived much sooner in history, but which must be embarked upon in the window of our own time. Black-oriented media is the most vulnerable to direct action and other forms of popular pressure, because Black people are the most concentrated demographic on the radio spectrum, and are also most keenly aware of the structural (power and race privilege) pillars that buttress their own oppression. Just as in the Sixties, when an entire nation was emboldened by Black folks to shed layers of historical harnesses, so too can the media reform movement tap into the deep current of creative Black discontent – in the spirit and practice of true solidarity.

It will require vision, planning, funding old fashioned organizing. But we will all reap the harvest.

BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be reached at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.

More Stories