News For The People: How Media Consolidation Crippled Black Politics & How to Fight Back

The purpose of this workshop is to demonstrate how corporate consolidation of Black-oriented commercial radio, which penetrates 80-90% of African American households, has led directly to the current crisis of leadership in Black America and contributed mightily to social disorganization in African American communities. The most disastrous result of consolidation has been the near-extinction of local news departments. We will propose specific strategies to enable communities to force owners to establish news departments at every Black-oriented outlet in their market.

Black-oriented radio’s unique history and the huge role it plays in African American life requires that its consolidation and the consequent loss of local news be confronted on its own terms, rather than as a subhead of general media reform – especially since the media reform movement proposes little more in the way of solutions than increased Black ownership. We will show that dramatic increases in Black ownership (at present, about 130 of the 500 or so stations targeting Black audiences) have resulted in news-less formats identical to white-owned Black-oriented radio outlets. The ethnicity of ownership is not the problem: the issue is the absolute necessity of local news through the medium that is the primary source of information in and about Black America.

By definition, this represents a discreet and particular intra-Black crisis, requiring community mobilization that is rooted in these particularities.

Although media consolidation has done vast damage to the nation as a whole, the loss of local news on Black-oriented commercial radio has snuffed out the only effective means for the voices and work of Black activists to be known to the masses of African Americans. The political crisis in Black America has evolved in tandem with the loss of Black radio news, which has resulted in:

a) A crippled Black leadership-creation process. Leadership is developed in struggle. However, the elimination of news on Black-oriented radio means that local community struggles and their leaders are unknown to those not directly affected. Budding leadership dies on the vine, frustrated and marginalized due to lack of effective access to the masses of African Americans tuned to Black-oriented radio. Over time, the media vacuum-induced failure to produce new leadership drains the pool of experienced organizers and honest community spokespersons, grays the ranks of leadership, and substitutes individuals that have never been involved in grassroots struggle – precisely what has occurred over the last three decades of decline in Black-oriented local radio news.

b) Accelerated community social disintegration. The news desert obviously leads to neglect of those organizations struggling to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods. The information vacuum also prevents various neighborhoods from forging solidarity in the face of common problems, but instead fosters juvenile and dangerous street-hype competition between them. Groups engaged in similar work in the same city operate in isolation from one another. A case in point: Latinos were able to put over a million people on the streets of various cities to make their views known on immigration, primarily through the connecting medium of Hispanic radio, which gave voice to the various local organizations that would mobilize the masses. Conversely, literally thousands of locally-based Katrina-related projects were launched by churches and other Black community organizations in the wake of the disaster, but no million-person march developed around this issue. Black-oriented radio had no mechanism – local news – that could have knit these isolated efforts together in a common project. Had local news operations existed, the Katrina-based protest would doubtless have led to citywide Black activist alliances across the nation – the seeds of a new “movement.” That opportunity has been lost.

c) The deformation of relationships between Black politicians and their constituencies. No local news means that local political campaigns receive no coverage in the medium that overwhelming proportions of Black voters consume: Black-oriented radio. This puts progressive Black candidates at a severe disadvantage, since African Americans must get their “news” through the prism of television and newspapers that do not pretend to specifically serve the Black community – as do even white corporate-owned Black-oriented radio stations. No matter how many events progressive candidates schedule, none will be covered by news-less Black-oriented radio. Only those Black candidates with advertising dollars can afford to reach their constituencies directly. The result: an increasingly corporate-sponsored cadre of local and national Black elected officials that has betrayed the progressive Black Political Consensus and are held accountable only by “general” news media outlets which do not even recognize the right of Black America to opinions of its own. As Chicago Black activists have stated, Harold Washington probably could not be elected mayor in today’s news-less Black radio environment. And we know that former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney’s message went no further than the participants in her many campaign events, since there was no coverage of the campaign by the medium that her core constituency consumes: Black-oriented radio.

d) Deepening dependence on corporations by traditional Black institutions and political formations. During the era when Black-oriented stations were expected to have a local news operation, community mobilization and education projects were the staple of news on Black radio. Organizations validated their existence to the Black community by the projects they launched, and new organizations sprang into existence on the strength of the mass appeal they garnered through coverage of their activities. None of this is possible in the absence of local news coverage on Black-oriented radio. The result: a retrenchment by established organizations such as the NAACP, which engage in far less mass activities than in the previous era largely because it is not practical to reach the Black masses; the disappearance of organizations that had thrived with little money because their activities were covered by local Black-oriented radio; and the non-birth of thousands of local formations that could and should have been born. Aging activists such as Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton now shape their schedules around getting the attention of “general” news media – the only way to reach masses of Black folks, aside from talk show deals with Clear Channel and (Black-owned) Radio One – while the NAACP desperately seeks to consummate a marriage with corporate sponsors.

e) The warping of the Black world view. A generation and more of younger Blacks have no model of what coverage of their own communities would sound like. They are left to invent their own ways of interpreting reality, without benefit of a regular menu of facts. Commercial products – recordings – dominate mass Black youth perceptions of their own communities, with no hourly interruption by news about what is really going on. When rappers declared that hip-hop was the news media of Black youth, they were literally correct, because by the time the genre exploded, there were very few news departments at the radio stations they listened to. The forced establishment of news operations at corporate-owned Black-oriented radio stations will not ensure good coverage of Black communities, but it will provide concrete models to critique, which is what politically healthy communities do. In the current situation, there is nothing to talk about unless some rapper says it, or a talk show host feels strongly about the subject or event. Most importantly, the local community activists who will actually force this addition to local formats will, by virtue of their own struggles with ownership, wield significant influence over the content and character of the news. That is their reward, as it should be.

How to Fight Back

Radio is an extremely vulnerable medium. Far less capital-intensive than television and newspapers, a radio station’s greatest asset is good will in a competitive market – an asset that can be damaged beyond repair by determined activists. Black-oriented radio stations, which collectively command extraordinary loyalty from the African American audience (that’s why they are so profitable), are especially vulnerable. The audience fervently wants to believe the station is “ours” – meaning, it serves Black people. Image is everything.

A concerted campaign to deconstruct that image – even the threat of a campaign by a credible array of forces – will force ownership to consider the relatively small costs of a news operation versus the damage to the station’s principle asset: its good will in the community. There is a myriad of actions available, which we will explicate and explore at the workshop. The central point is that this is an activists’ project, because it is the activists who have the most to immediately gain: regular access to the Black masses through news coverage in the medium that continues to be by far the most effective Black communications network in the United States. Every other medium for reaching African Americans in their own cultural environment is miniscule, in comparison.

News4ThePeopleCoalitions are being established in three markets: Baltimore-Washington, Chicago and Atlanta. Two principles guide the project:

1) ALL Black-oriented stations in the market that have no news department must be targeted, whether Black- or white-owned. Black corporate owners behave exactly like white owners, and can be given no free pass, although the political line regarding them must of necessity be framed differently: that they have betrayed their own people.

2) The irreducible demand is regular newscasts throughout the broadcast day, NOT talk shows. This is why every Black-oriented station in the market must be presented with the same demand, so that none can cry they will be put at a competitive disadvantage.

The Workshop

The workshop will include the following elements:

1) Introduce audience to scope and penetration of Black-oriented radio, as a genre/format.

2) Give overview of consolidation of Black-oriented radio, compared with general market radio consolidation.

3) Link history of Black-oriented radio to Black Freedom Struggle, leading directly to proliferation of local station news operations.

4) Explain relationship between past Black-oriented news operations and leadership-formation process in Black America. Specific examples.

5) Explore rise of Black radio ownership, and coterminous shrinkage of Black-oriented radio news.

6) Discuss merits and weaknesses of “talk” radio in the absence of news.

7) Describe the News4ThePeople project to force reinstatement of local news on Black-oriented radio stations; strategy, tactics, and expected results.

The Participants

Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon, Executive Editor and Managing Editor, respectively, of BlackAgendaReport.com.
Jared Ball, Phd in journalism
Todd Burroughs, Phd in journalism
Leutisha Stills, Congressional Black Caucus Monitor