Glen Ford is the executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, from which this commentary has been condensed. Read the full article here.
When 2,500 activists gather for the National Conference on Media Reform in Memphis this weekend, one of the chief villains of the event will be Clear Channel, the media giant that has sucked up and dumbed down 1,200 commercial radio stations. The vast bulk of these were devoured in the decade since the U.S. Congress ushered in a corporate feeding frenzy with its Telecommunications Act of 1996. If past Media Reform conferences (2003 and 2005 ) are any guide, participants will—correctly—rail against the strangling grip of a corporate media oligarchy that manipulates and distorts the purchasing behavior, moral judgment and global worldview of the nation.
We at Black Agenda Report fear, however, that the African American corporate players in the Great Media Rip-Off will largely get a free pass—while discussion of the black commercial radio scene will, as usual, be limited to the general precariousness of (small) black station ownership and the poisonous nature of the musical menus beamed to the inner cities. We can safely—and sadly—predict that there will be little discussion in Memphis of the specific path that consolidation has taken in African-American radio markets, nor of the fracturing of previously progressive black political institutions that has resulted from the near-extinction of local black radio news.
When progressives lump together the generalized effects of media consolidation—in effect saying: Well, the corporations are hurting everybody, so let’s all stick to the same page—they ignore the history that has created profound differences in the political and communications structures of black and white America. Black commercial radio is the primary communications system for African Americans, reaching more than 80 percent of black households. Born in the throes of the Black Freedom Movement, commercial black radio cannot be replaced by alternative information systems. So pervasive is black radio’s reach and influence among African Americans, there is no choice but to organize massively to force corporations—including black-owned corporations—to reinstate hourly, local black news coverage.
After the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the urban rebellions of 1968, news operations proliferated in the exploding black radio market—a potent nutrient for the political forces bubbling from the ground up following the death of Jim Crow. Local black radio news empowered these new forces, treating them as legitimate voices of the people—no matter what the white corporate media said. Vast cadres of activists became powerful political actors —made “authentic” by their recognition as “leaders” by local black radio news staffs.
The early to mid-1970s was the Golden Age of both local black radio news and grassroots urban activism—an historical synergy. As I wrote in the May 29, 2003 , edition of Black Commentator :
In 1973, 21 reporters from three black-oriented radio stations provided African Americans in Washington, D.C. a daily diet of news—hard, factual information vital to the material and political fortunes of the local community. The three stations—WOL-AM, WOOK-AM and WHUR-FM—their news staffs as fiercely competitive as their disc jockeys, vied for domination of the black Washington market. Community activists and institutions demanded, expected, and received intense and sustained coverage of the fullest range of their activities.
Even stations in small black markets fielded at least one- or two-person news staffs, nurturing emerging political structures throughout black America. But this “Golden Age” was not to last long.
As in the general market, the gradual extinction of local black news is a product of corporate consolidation of media. However, the repercussions are far more disastrous in black America—and consequently, for the prospects of the nation as a whole—distorting political structures that were, in large part, made possible through the synergy of grassroots activism and local black radio journalism. The “leadership-creating” mechanisms of a people have been short-circuited. For a progressive movement that is numerically at least half African American (see Bruce Dixon, “Where the Left Lives ,” October 6, 2005), the prospects are dire, indeed. The co-sponsor of the telecom industry’s COPE Act, endorsed by two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus, was Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush—a former Black Panther! Chicago Black radio—as in most population centers—is virtually devoid of news, so who is to know what crimes are committed by the people’s “progressive” representatives?
The segmentation of radio—slicing it up into isolated demographics, sealed off from one another’s conversations—that is the hallmark of corporate consolidation becomes even more destructive to the social fabric in the absence of regular news broadcasts. When massive immigrant rights demonstrations were held in Los Angeles and other cities last year, black-oriented Emmis Communications station KKBT-FM “completely ignored one million people in the streets,” Davey D told this writer. It was “similar to the Million Man March right on their doorstep,” yet to KKBT and its listeners, it “didn’t exist.”
People’s power can only trump corporate power when the people are enabled to learn of each other’s struggles and make decisions on whether commonality exists, or not. That’s a job for news operations that are in tune with the concerns of local communities. It is also the spirit of the founding Communications Act of 1934 , which black journalists and activists followed to its logical, empowering conclusion in the 1970s, until black radio news was snuffed out by both black and white corporate power.
If there is to be effective action to bring back black local radio news, it must take the form of an organizers movement, spearheaded by those groups that still labor in the trenches of social change in the various localities—grassroots organizations whose predecessors’ struggles, decades ago, were catapulted from the paper-flyer age into the mass broadcast arena, when news from a black radio source was available to be acted upon by millions of people. The Internet will not suffice; neither will alternative broadcast forms, as valuable a contribution as these mediums represent. The people listen to commercial black radio, and the struggle must be taken to the proprietors’ doorsteps—regardless of race.
