What You Need To Know About Black Radio
In a schema unique to the United States, nearly all broadcast media are exclusively licensed to private owners, on the supposed condition that they serve the public interest. In fact, broadcasters are utterly free to reap vast fortunes using the limited public resource of the broadcast spectrum. Black commercial radio is no different, whether or not its nominal owners are African American.
Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon have written extensively on media and on black radio in Black Agenda Report, and Ford before that in Black Commentator.
by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford
This item was originally published in Black Commentator on May 29, 2003
There are more than one million Black radio listeners apiece in metro Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore-DC, Houston, Philadelphia, and twice that many in the tri-state metro area centered by New York. But not one of these major markets has a single full time black news reporter reporting on and packaging news for a black audience. Not one.
It wasn't always this way. What changed and why? What does the absence of news reporting mean to our communities, our futures, to the public space for black on black dialog?
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Black Radio and the "Performance Rights" Toll Booth
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon on May 20, 2009
The cynically misnamed "Performance Rights" legislation will not benefit performers. It will extract a premium from radio broadcasters, killing some, and transforming others for the worse. It will create another piece of "intellectual property" which the recording industry is poised to benefit from at the expense of artists, radio broadcasters and the public, and legaiize payola. And once the performance rights toll booth is established in broadcast radio, it can and will be deployed elsewhere. HR 848 is bad news for broadcasters, bad news for artists, and bad news for almost everybody.
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by BAR executive editor Glen Ford on May 1, 2007 The often convoluted debate over hip-hop lyrics and images frequently misses the point: mass marketed rap recordings, videos and stage acts are corporate products, and the artists are virtual employees and subcontractors of huge multinationals. Corporate control of the cultural marketplace is the real villain in this story, not artists who did not pick themselves for stardom and cannot on their own alter boardroom business models. Corporations have been usurping and reshaping Black mass culture for decades - hip-hop is just the latest product line.
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by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford
This item was originally published in Black Commentator on May 1, 2003.
In terms of effective Black access, the airwaves have long been a wasteland. In a fundamental political sense, all corporations resist popular power and speak a common language of profit - including Black-owned media corporations, once they have gained sufficient foothold in the marketplace. The corporatization of the media message has proceeded without interruption since well before the FCC's Fairness Doctrine was finally discarded, in 1987.
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by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon on April 15, 2009
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 own our own black civic conversation?
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford on November 13, 2007
"How did Black-oriented radio devolve to such garbage?"
Syndicated hustler Michael Baisden, eager to become kingpin of Jena Six fundraising, launched a slanderous campaign against every Black group that doesn't have access to ABC radio's corporate reach. Baisden's principal target: Color of Change, the mass-based Internet organization that raised and distributed over $200,000 for Jena defendants' legal fees in record time. Baisden used his 50-station network to defame Color of Change, in "reckless disregard of the truth," and was soon forced to issue a fraction of an apology. But Baisden's crimes only serve to dramatize the fact that near-extinction of Black radio news - the mechanism that could have stopped the junkyard dog in his filthy tracks - has left African Americans at the mercy of "media leadership." We must reclaim the commercial airwaves that reach 80-90 percent of Blacks.
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by BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon on July 2, 2008
The US broadcast media regime, in which greedy, amoral corporations enjoy completely free monopoly licenses to run their highly profitable businesses upon the scarce public property that is the broadcast spectrum is usually presented to us as the only “natural” and sensible media order. It is, we've all been told, the benign and logical outcome of democratic give and take and rigorous competition in a free marketplace. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
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James Brown: The Man Who Named a People
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford on January 3, 2007
James Brown’s historic contribution to Black self-determination is incalculable, writes BAR’s Executive Editor. The ‘Godfather of Soul’ made it possible for the masses of people to affirm their own name.
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