Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, Tavis Smiley, and the Impoverishment of Black Media
Printer-friendly version
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 own our own black civic conversation?
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 sets 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.
Email this page
Comments
Tom Joyner
Your guess is as good as mine. However, the reduction of Tom Joyner's program, Tavis Smiley's program, and other informative programs that focus on news in the black urban communities, we should ask ourselves pass4sure 642-731 just who is being held accountable for the lack of relevant news in black pass4sure 642-973 communities? A large part of that burden falls upon us as we continue to focus on music, radio DJ chatter, and frivolous pass4sure N10-003 parties and get-togethers. Is that all we, as a serious black community is about? Apparently, yes!!! We need to tune out those stations that don't report human. social, and health news in the black communities. That is the pass4sure JN0-202 only way that they will change their formats.
Cuban leader Raul Castro has
Cuban leader Raul Castro has offered to put “everything” on the table for discussion, including exchanges of political prisoners.
best id theft services
Black Squirrel Radio is an
Black Squirrel Radio is an online radio station run by students of Kent State University, broadcasting exclusively on campus television and the web host. Previously known as WKSR, the station's name was changed in 2005 due to a legal conflict with WKSR-FM, the broadcast station using the same call letters]. Black Squirrel Radio is overseen by faculty from Kent State University's Journalism and Mass Communication program. Since the name change, Black Squirrel Radio has been expanding the breadth of their content to include podcasting cameras and talk radio shows in addition to music shows. Black Squirrel Radio currently has 120 students on its staff.
Black Squirrel Radio's lineage can be traced to the 1930s and the Radio Workshop in the School of Speech at Kent State University. BSR is an affiliate of UWIRE, which gathers, edits, and re-distributes student-created content, and broadcasts life insurance news at 15 minutes before the hour and at 15 minutes past the hour.
This should be properly
This should be properly addressed to by appropriate entities before the issue escalates out of proportion. Racism is a very hot issue that just a minor issue has the capability of triggering massive uproars. We don't want that to happen.
closet organizer showroom | closet organizing tips
Commercial black radio and TV have not always been hostile
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.
free classified ads
black radio
Years ago I used to listen to blake radio online through itunes. They had a great talk show format with a number of different shows.
It's where I heard about Dr. Boyd Graves, a brother who found the AIDS plan http://boydgraves.com/
I don't listen to top 40 so my dial doesn't go above 91.3 here in Seattle.
There is a good morning talk show on AM1620, KYIZ http://ztwins.com/. Now why they're called the ztwins
when they have 3 stations I don't know.
Black Radio Demise
Peace,
Well, it seems as though there will be an economic battle for the existing black radio stations and the quest for a balanced radio format. Will it be on any major Black radio stations? Your guess is as good as mine. However, the reduction of Tom Joyner's program, Tavis Smiley's program, and other informative programs that focus on news in the black urban communities, we should ask ourselves just who is being held accountable for the lack of relevant news in black communities? A large part of that burden falls upon us as we continue to focus on music, radio DJ chatter, and frivolous parties and get-togethers. Is that all we, as a serious black community is about? Apparently, yes!!! We need to tune out those stations that don't report human. social, and health news in the black communities. That is the only way that they will change their formats. We need to get pro-active...with the triple quickness!!!
Sorry, but Sirius satellite radio
isn't worth my $130+ a year to hear Glen Ford or Bruce Dixon on Mark Thompson's Make It Plain show once a week. As for the Foxxhole, that channel is full of foul-mouthed comedians not saying anything funny. Would rather listen to old Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx or Dap Sugar Willie records.
I hate black radio
I cancelled my subscription to Sirius satellite radio because there was no informative programming for African Americans, endless replays of 25 classic soul songs, idiotic chatter on the Jamie Foxx channel, etc. My local radio/tv stations are no better, just a rehash of Amos n Andy-type morning show nonsense, repeats of Good Times, Sandford and Son, and other stupid comedies on tv-one/bet. God I miss The Boondocks. I'd love to watch/read/listen to direct, unafraid black programming. Any suggestions?
You say Jamie Foxx gets a whole channel?
You DO know that BAR is on Sirius Left every Wednesday at 7 PM. I think Black Commentator has an hour on Thursday too. Too bad we are not worth the price of admission alone. You say Jamie Foxx has a whole channel?
Evidently nothing will change till people start acting like citizens and stakeholders rather than as consumers.
Let's hope any resurrecting
Let's hope any resurrecting of news in black media will include people who practice actual journalism, not stenography and infotainment. I never listened to Joyner but I'll bet voices/opinions from people such as Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford were rarely, if ever, heard on his news/discussion segments. Such voices are rarely heard on Tavis Smiley broadcasts as well.
In order to inform and educate the public, black media, be it air, electronic, or print needs to be willing to call out its sacred cows and tell all sides of the story. That means less love fests and omissions of harsh facts on folks like Obama for example. Gazillionaire Oprah, along with a few other wealthy black investors, surely has a few bucks to spare to set up a black news medium. Good idea, but the results would be crap as Oprah and company would never risk upsetting the govt/corporate status quo. So much for her "power."
A large part of that burden
A large part of that burden falls upon us as we continue to focus on music, radio DJ chatter, and frivolous parties and get-togethers. Is that all we, as a serious black community is about? Apparently, yes!!! We need to tune out those stations that don't report human. social, and health news in the black communities.
web engineering
I cancelled my subscription
I cancelled my subscription to Sirius satellite radio because there was no informative programming for African Americans, endless replays of 25 classic soul songs, idiotic chatter on the Jamie Foxx channel, etc. My local radio/tv stations are no better, just a rehash of Amos n Andy-type morning show nonsense, repeats of Good Times, Sandford and Son, and other stupid comedies on tv-one/bet. God I miss The Boondocks. I'd love to watch/read/listen to direct, unafraid black programming. Any suggestions? @TK0-201