Black commercial radio station owners, like all other broadcasters, hold their licenses on the condition that they faithfully serve the public interest. But commercial black radio, whether owned by African Americans or not, is failing that test. Commercial black radio treats its audience exclusively as a market, not a polity, and acknowledges no public service obligation worth mentioning.
At the coming National Conference For Media Reform, plans will be unveiled for a national campaign to bring locally gathered news and local news departments to commercial black radio. Changing the way black radio operates is only possible by mobilizing key constituencies in the communities broadcasters treat as passive markets. And this may be the time it begins to happen.
Once upon a time, there was such a thing as public space. Not just a physical public space, but a social space, existing partly in mass media. This public and social space was one in which the individual and collective experiences of people might be brought out, examined, compared and evaluated in light of what we expected from a civil society. It was the existence of this public and social space which gave birth to many movements and strains of movements for civil and human rights in the 19th and 20th centuries.
This public space, in physical locations, in social situations, and in media is rapidly disappearing, being privatized or commodified. Where there were once public streets in which you could pass out leaflets, register people to vote or convene impromptu meetings there are now private malls and parking lots and wearing an antiwar T-short will get you ejected. Adults whose parents only worked eight or ten hours a day, and had time to engage in meetings and voluntary activities afterward are saddled with longer hours and more distant commutes than their parents. With less time for family, friends and community, their contribution to the store of social capital, their participation in all kinds of voluntary organizations is at a far lower rate than that of their parents, and our communities are the poorer for it.
Like the physical and social public spaces, the media portion of public space has likewise declined and become a commodity, bought, sold and speculated upon by investors, and managed for their exclusive benefit.
"The near disappearance of broadcast radio news is somewhat masked by the growth of talk radio, but whatever talk radio is, it is not news."
News is, of course, the raw material of public discourse, of public consciousness itself. As the wave of broadcast consolidations have peaked, local newsrooms and local news broadcasts have all but disappeared. Nowhere is the absence of locally produced and locally oriented news coverage more keenly felt than in African American communities. Despite the disappearance of news coverage, African American radio listeners remain disproportionately loyal to a few stations and formats in every major US market. As a result these broadcasters remain uniquely sensitive to the will of those communities.
The near disappearance of broadcast radio news is somewhat masked by the growth of talk radio, but whatever talk radio is, it is not news. Talk radio hosts offer their own unfiltered opinions and those of their guests, often together with audience call-ins. No editors fact-check the content of talk radio, either before or after broadcast, and there is nothing that even purports to be a standard of “objectivity”. Some talk radio hosts are indeed journalists, but most are not. This year's State of Journalism 2008 by the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism showed that the majority of talk show topics are indeed riffs on news stories, but talk shows do not break new stories, or conduct the investigations that break the stories. The talk show then, is a kind of remnant of what used to be a much larger and more vigorous public space, nourished by a plentiful supply of local news. But just as the number of news gathering organizations and working journalists continues to decline across print and broadcast platforms, radio news is steadily drying up too.
As does, we are witnessing the disappearance of black America's ability to talk to itself in, and to hear its own authentic voices. If Dr. Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Improvement Association were conducting their historic bus boycott under today's media regime, few people outside that city would be aware of it, and many black citizens inside Montgomery itself would be in the dark as well.
In the heyday of civil rights activism many African Americans, especially in the north, had no direct ties to the student movement or to those churches and other organizations which were active participants in the Freedom Movement. They learned about the Movement the same way many white Americans did. They saw it on TV, they read about it in the papers, they heard about it on the radio.
"...most listeners to black radio have no idea what a locally produced and locally oriented five minute newscast would even sound like. Most station managers would argue that they don't do news because it's something their listeners don't care about. But it's a choice listeners have never been given."
Black radio, back in the days when locally produced news coverage was a staple of the medium, played a major role as transmitter and conveyor, as the very circulatory system of public consciousness in African American communities. In 1973 there were as many as 21 reporters from three black radio stations covering national and local affairs in the Washington DC market, providing broadcast constituencies with a rich diet of news and public affairs coverage upon which that community thrived. This was not too different from Atlanta or Chicago or Detroit around the same time. Even in Columbus GA, then and now a market a tenth the size of Chicago, the lone black radio station in 1972 fielded a news department of no less than 2 full and one part time reporters, covering mostly local affairs, a number comparable to or greater than the total number of full time black journalists reporting, writing and broadcasting for all of Chicago's or Detroit's or Atlanta's several black-oriented stations today.
Well after the decline of black radio news had begun, black talk radio continued to run off the impetus of journalism and the remnant fumes of the movement era. The election of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black and only reform-oriented mayor was made possible by early 80s black talk radio. Those fumes are long gone now. Black talk radio hosts are rarely journalists any more, and even on black stations with supposed “news-talk” formats, the hosts are not parts of news departments, there are no assignment or other editors, and the hosts don't get paid anywhere near what daily print journalists in the same market do.
Hence most listeners to black radio have no idea what a locally produced and locally oriented five minute newscast would even sound like. Most station managers would argue that they don't do news because it's something their listeners don't care about. But it's a choice listeners have never been given.
This may be about to change.
Black Agenda Report will take part in the June 6-8 Media Reform Conference held this year in Minneapolis. At the conference, we will unveil a model plan to organize and provide technical assistance to black communities in several of the nation's top ten radio markets, challenging the owners of broadcast commercial black radio to provide regularly scheduled and locally oriented news broadcasts to their markets, put together by teams of locally hired journalists.
If our model of persuading commercial black radio broadcasters to hire local journalists to staff news departments, and deliver hourly news succeeds, or even gets off the ground in our key markets, it will be imitated in many others, creating dozens or hundreds of employment opportunities for local black journalists eager to make a living serving their communities.
We must remember that broadcasters do not “own” their frequencies. No super-smart engineer or clever entrepreneur “invented” radio. The broadcast spectrum is a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity or sunlight, and “owned” by nobody. The federal government grants broadcast licenses on the criterion that the grantee serve the public interest. The notion of exactly what constitutes sufficient public service to keep a broadcast license is elastic, dependent upon public opinion and whatever legislation can be passed at a given time. But when it comes to regulating corporate behavior, the rock of public opinion has to be moved first, before the law can be changed.
"Commercial broadcasters who aim their programming at black audiences are used to considering us only as a passive market. "
Commercial black radio, including black-owned Radio One, is in a self-serving but highly profitable rut. Spin the dial in any major market from coast to coast and you get the same handful of artists singing the same songs, whether the genre is Gospel or Hiphop or anything in between. At one time, local artists could contact local deejays, and get their music on the air in their home markets. If they succeeded there, stations in other markets might pick it up. Even when local stations back in the day, demanded payola according to Paul Porter of Industry Ears, the local market figures were relatively affordable. Now national program managers at firms like Radio One and Clear Channel make up the playlists for stations in dozens of markets. New artists in every genre are locked out unless they get the blessing of monopolies that control national distribution, or can afford the seven figure payola amounts needed to buy national airplay.
Black radio not only doesn't do news, it doesn't do art or entertainment very well either.
Commercial broadcasters who aim their programming at black audiences are used to considering us only as a passive market. But if black America is more than a market, if it is a polity, then it's time to demand that black-oriented media, whoever owns it, serve black communities. We at Black Agenda Report believe that the financial case for station owners is persuasive. Station owners need community good will, or their relations with advertisers are impaired. Combined with the reasonable of establishing and operating a news department, we suspect that case that community activists can make to station owners will be irresistible.
We don't know all of what else will be happening at the Media Conference on June 6-8, because we've been too busy putting together our own contribution to it. But we know from past conferences that if you want to learn more about how media affects your work, your community, your life you can't afford to miss it. If you're looking for the latest lessons, the best practices and the most innovative ideas on how to work for a just and democratic media, a righteous and peaceful world, it's the place to be.
We also know that black radio still reaches better than 80% of black households, whether it's hip-hop, Gospel, oldies, or talk or some combination of the above. We know that our community has a right to use the media, broadcast and otherwise, to speak to itself in its own voice. We know that cheap and available broadband access is as necessary to the economic development of black communities in the 21st century as paved streets and roads were in the 20th. We know that hundreds of black and other activists from around the country will be in Minneapolis June 6-8 focused intently on how to make our people's voices heard. You should be there too.
But if you can't make it, audio and/or video of each and every one of the dozens of panels and workshops will be available on the Free Press conference web site. And whether you make it or not, we strongly suggest you visit the web site of Free Press and sign up for one of their several regular email alerts on telecom legislation, broadband access, or other matters. We look forward to meeting and working with as many of our readers as we can in the coming weeks and months. See you in Minneapolis.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and lives in metro Atlanta. He can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com