A few months ago, while standing at the register in my Dad's store in New Jersey, I was speaking to a business, ?, man who said it would be advisable to sell this magazine when it reaches my peak. Now I am adamant against anything that anyone tells me that I feel is against my better judgment. I was born stubborn, sue me. In my mind, it was like the magazine is in its brainstorming phase and we're already talking about selling? I just didn't get it. I'm glad I didn't because this is why:
Recently, Sheila Johnson the co-founder of BET stated that she hated the direction the network has taken since she sold the network to Viacom. Here is her full quote:
"Don’t even get me started, I don’t watch it. I suggest to my kids [a 20-something daughter and a college-age son] that they don’t watch it… I’m ashamed of it, if you want to know the truth."
It wasn’t always that way. “When we started BET, it was going to be the Ebony magazine on television,” Johnson tells me. “We had public affairs programming. We had news… I had a show called Teen Summit, we had a large variety of programming, but the problem is that then the video revolution started up… And then something started happening, and I didn’t like it all. And I remember during those days we would sit up and watch these videos and decide which ones were going on and which ones were not. We got a lot of backlash from recording artists…and we had to start showing them. I didn’t like the way women were being portrayed in these videos.
Johnson says she no longer has any connection with BET. “I just really wish—and not just BET but a lot of television programming—that they would stop lowering the bar so far just so they can get eyeballs to the screen,” she says. “I know they think that’s what’s going to keep programming on the air; that’s what’s going to sell advertising. But there has got to be some responsibility. Somebody has got to take this over. Because with all the studies that are out there, this is contributing to an atmosphere of free sex, ‘I don’t have to protect myself anymore
Sheilia Johnson and Bob Johnson sold BET to Viacom in 1997 for $3 Billion Dollars-yes that's with a B-making them the nations first black billionaires. The pair divorced five years later. I understand her stance, because very few people like BET but I feel like that's what happens when you have corporate people who've probably never stepped inside a black neighborhood creating what they feel black people want to see.
0 comments:
Post a Comment