22 Jun When founder Robert L. Jo
When founder Robert L. Johnson stepped down as CEO of Black Entertainment Television (BET) in 2005, Debra L. Lee, who’d served as the company’s chief operating officer for more than a decade, took over the top spot at the network, which specializes in programming for African American audiences. Lee had already pioneered BET’s expansion into original movies, concerts, talk shows, and public-policy programming—all the while delivering record-setting ratings during a time when the cable market as a whole was experiencing slow growth. Just as she was settling into her new job, her bosses at parent company Viacom charged Lee with developing a strategy for growth through expanded content. As it happened, Lee had already taken a first step in meeting her bosses’ goals by hiring Reginald Hudlin to fill the newly created position of President of Entertainment. At a time when “original programming is a strategic priority for BET,” announced Lee, Hudlin, a veteran film producer, would take over programming development and acquisition for BET’s music, entertainment, specials, sports, public-affairs, and homeentertainment units. Lee also put Hudlin on the front line of the network’s efforts to combat growing criticism of its current content. For several years, critics within the African American community had been chastising BET for its increasing reliance on music videos and other programs that perpetuated demeaning stereotypes of its own African American audience. For many African Americans, BET had forsaken its original promise as the first black-owned network, having abandoned its original family-oriented programming in favor of youth-oriented shows with a harder edge, including and especially programming that seemed to celebrate the ethos of gangsta rap. “People always ask me what’s wrong with BET,” says activist and writer Kevin Powell, a frequent contributor to BET news programs, who immediately offered an answer to his own question: “We have to stop participating in the one-dimensional portrayals of ourselves.” “I don’t like everything that’s on [BET] now,” admitted Lee when she introduced Hudlin. “But it’s all about how young people express themselves. . . . We are not PBS, and we’ll never be PBS,” she added, indicating that BET executives did not intend to abandon their core (largely male) audience of 18- to 34-year-old viewers. Hudlin soon announced a forthcoming lineup of no fewer than 16 original shows, but most of them either failed to materialize or died untimely deaths. Among those that did hit the airwaves, Hot Ghetto Mess featured video clips in which young African Americans in Washington, D.C., displayed cultural ignorance and a penchant for stupid behavior. The program quickly inspired a petition from more than 5,000 African Americans protesting BET’s habit of “mak[ing] black people look like buffoons.” Two major advertisers—State Farm Insurance and Home Depot— requested that their ads not be shown during or in conjunction with the show. Meanwhile, an anti-BET group calling itself “Enough Is Enough” was formed, and in September 2007, in the first of a series of demonstrations that lasted through the following April, members camped outside Lee’s Washington, D.C., home, brandishing signs reading “We Are NOT Gangsters and Pimps” and chanting, “BET—Be better! Do better!” “The purpose of this campaign,” stated organizer Delman Coates, a D.C.-area pastor, “is to protest the commercialization, marketing, and distribution of content that degrades black men and women and portrays negative stereotypes of black men . . . as pimps, players, hustlers, and thugs.” In April 2008, Enough Is Enough and the Parents Television Council released the results of a study, called “The Rap on Rap,” which focused on the content of three music video programs, one airing on MTV and two on BET. It found that viewers were presented with adult content—references to drugs, sex, or violence—an average of once every 38 seconds. Only the MTV program was rated TV-14, and 40 percent of the total viewership was under the age of 18. Lee responded by pointing out that music videos made up only 20 percent of BET’s programming, down from 70 percent just three years earlier, but it was clear to most observers that BET had drifted a long way from Robert Johnson’s vision of a network that “should be for black media what Disney is to the general media.” One of those critics was cofounder Sheila Johnson, Robert’s former wife. “Don’t even get me started,” she told an interviewer in 2010. “When we started BET . . . we had public-affairs programming. We had news. . . . [W]e had a large variety of programming, but the problem is that then the video revolution started up. . . . I just really wish . . . that they’d stop lowering the bar so far just so they can get eyeballs to the screen.” Rex Hudlin had resigned in 2008, the result of what Lee called “a mutual decision,” but after two years on the job, he had at least identified what many people still regard as BET’s key challenge—changing people’s perception of the network. That problem, however, appears to go deeper than matters of mere perception: It may in fact be rooted in the network’s culture and marketing infrastructure, both of which revolve around the 18-to-34 demographic on which its success has long depended. “The folks who run BET really have to be honest about the demographic of their audience,” says Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black studies at Duke University. “If we’re talking about African Ameri‑ cans over 35, that’s not their audience. Older audiences are turned off by a lot of stuff they do,” concludes Neal, who suggests that the task still facing Lee and her team is more complicated than simply adding blocs of less controversial programs designed to satisfy an “older audience” that BET isn’t going to attract anyway. Any new programming on BET, says Neal, must deflect increasingly energetic criti‑ cism while continuing to hold the attention of the network’s current audience of younger African American viewers.
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