Talkback
by Staff -- Multichannel News, 3/16/2009 2:00:00 AM
Johnson’s Already Had His Chance
(RE: “Johnson: 'We Need More Minority TV,’ ” Multichannel.com, March 9) “[Urban TV founder Bob] Johnson wants to piggyback on someone else’s dime. When he set up and and sorta owned BET, he promised educational and cultural programming for African-Americans. BET became the 'hoochie-mama-butt-shaking’ channel. In the Ion/Johnson filing, is there an ironclad promise of public service or educational TV? Urban TV would be nothing more than infomercials and reruns of reruns and then it would start up with a little T&A here, a little T&A there — down the slippery slope. Johnson burned his bridges, politically and morally. Why give him another shot?”
J. Womack, Media Consultant Durham, N.C.
Urban TV Would Fill an Obvious Need
“We do need more minority programming. As for as the mindset of, 'Where is the Caucasian Network?’ we look at them everyday (NBC, CBS, Fox, etc.). It is already part of the infrastructure but the average person is blind to the concept that is taken for granted in our day to day lives in every aspect. Logo has been created for the gay and lesbian viewer; Lifetime and WE for women; Sì TV for Hispanics — there are a lot of niche networks, so when black people want another network people need to respect that like we respect all the white networks we love to watch. We have been watching white people for 50 years on TV. We are here and we are not going anywhere and we have more than contributed to this nation along with it making plenty money off of our communities. Regardless of all the fancy and negative statistics, we are a viable powerful community and we want to watch TV with some black people sometimes. There is nothing wrong with that. … Maybe our billions of dollars we have been spending should go towards advertisers who don’t mind supporting more diverse TV shows or networks that represent the emerging demo of the country. They have stats for that too.”
Dianne Hall , Producer
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