Greedy Telecoms Are Using an African-American Front Group to Fight Net Neutrality

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Photo Credit: Image by pfig via Flickr

It's old news by now that the African American conversation, as heard on corporate media, throughout commercial black radio, is limited to what greedy corporations owning those stations want us to, or will allow us to talk about. When we listen to Warren Ballantine and Steve Harvey giving relationship advice, to Gale King interviewing celebrities, to gay-hating gospel entertainers like Donnie McClurkin, to Rev. Al Sharpton pitching predatory car title loans, or even Tom Joyner on the Morning Show himself, we are not hearing our conversation, or our news about our lives and concerns. We're hearing the voice of our would-be masters.

Black communities are overwhelmingly against privatizing schools and public resources, and widely oppose the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and everywhere else, more so than any other constituency in the nation. But when was the last time you heard a whisper of this on black TV and radio. In black-oriented media? In the very places we ought to be able to hear our own voices, our collective political will is a political won't, a corporate and commercial no-go zone.

On August 4, 2010 Tom Joyner had as guest on his nationally syndicated Morning Show one Julius Hollis, an African American former telecom exec who heads up the Alliance For Digital Equality (ADE), a corporate lobbying entity in blackface, widely believed to be funded largely by AT&T. We have included a link to the six minute segment in this article.

In it, Joyner strokes Hollis, first just for being “a good guy,” secondly for his supposed advocacy on extending “access to digital technology by minority communities”, and third for Hollis's and ADE's alleged philanthropy. Hollis asserts that he helped start an in-school and after-school program for fifty children in Atlanta which is now “accessible to” more than 2.1 million children. That's a lot of children. BAR called ADE's headquarters in Atlanta. We asked where those 2.1 million children were, and exactly what Hollis meant when he said his program was “accessible to” them. Despite repeated telephone inquiries over the course of a week nobody at ADE could tell us that. In fact, they took our calls politely, but never returned any.

We suspect that Hollis's claim was misleading at least, and fraudulent at worst. If his program actually served 2.1 million children, ADE would be anxious to show the world, rather than hiding from legitimate inquiries. Besides, “accessible to” is a lawyerly weasel-word phrase calculated to sound very much like “our program actually serves 2.1 million children” while allowing whoever made the statement to say they really meant no such thing. Harvard Law School is theoretically “accessible to” everybody as well. Again, BAR gave ADE and Hollis a chance to explain what they mean, a chance they passed up. We won't call Hollis a liar. But we wish he would explain “accessible to” and show us the 2.1 million children his program serves, if that's the truth. Maybe Tom Joyner will invite him back to explain it all.

Is ADE really a charitable organization of high-level black and brown “entrepreneurs” all about “giving back” because they're such good guys and girls? ADE does not disclose its budget, but to sourcewatch.org, the indispensable wiki on corporate front organizations,

“Its 2007 tax return (Form 990),” according to SourceWatch, “...had an operating budget of over $2 million, of which no money was allocated for fundraising, nor hiring of employees. In fact, the total compensation for board members exceeded the amount of all program-related expenses.”