Minorities and the Media: Little Ownership and Even Less Control

American culture is more diverse now than ever. For years, media regulators and observers in this country have touted the virtue and necessity of increased minority presence in the development and ownership of media content and distribution, in order to ensure that the voices of all Americans are heard.

But with the proliferation of media mergers and buyouts of minority-owned broadcast stations, the plight of minority media is more discouraging now than it was a generation ago. And almost as unsettling, the roles of minorities and women in Hollywood continue to be far less significant than those of their white male counterparts, regardless of attempts to bolster their numbers and their decision-making power in Hollywood.

Minorities and the Broadcast Medium Today

"Minority ownership" has generally been defined as any media facility in which minorities possess more than 50 percent of a firm’s equity interests or stock, and/or exercise actual control of the facility. According to a 2001 report released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on the state of media ownership in this country, minorities owned 449 of the 11,865 full-power commercial radio and television stations in the U.S., or 3.8 percent. Of these, 426 were commercial radio stations--comprising 4 percent of total commercial radio ownership--while the remaining 23 were commercial television stations, representing 1.9 percent of the country’s 1,288 commercial television licenses. Such figures stand in sharp contrast to the population figures as a whole for 2001, in which minorities represented nearly a third of the total US population.

As discouraging as these numbers appear, they are even more disturbing in that over half of the 426 minority-owned radio stations (248) are AM stations, which traditionally have less power and generate less advertising revenue than their FM counterparts. Many minority broadcasters blame their inability to gain sufficient capital, coupled with the skyrocketing costs required to purchase these outlets, for the low numbers of minority FM and television ownership.

The numbers for minority ownership of cable networks seem even bleaker, with only one network, Univision (the nation’s most popular Spanish-speaking network) which owns and operates 16 full-power stations in 11 of the top 15 markets in the country, classified as minority owned. (Twenty-five percent of Univision is owned by Venevision, a Venezuelan media company, while another twenty-five percent is owned by Televisa, a Mexican entertainment conglomerate.)

Minority ownership in cable television has traditionally been all but nonexistent, in spite of the fact that minorities consume premium cable services at higher rates than whites, since cable provides minorities with more opportunities than does network programming to see themselves and their experiences on television. In fact, in 2000, the NAACP gave the entire cable industry a grade of "C," based on the areas of minority employment, hiring and promotions, service deployment, procurement/vendor relations, advertising/marketing, and charitable activity.

And even Robert Johnson, former owner of BET--the only black-owned national cable channel--believes that the future of black cable ownership is bleak. In a recent Financial Times (London) article, Johnson stated that blacks must look to white money in order to scale the U.S. corporate heights. "You can’t do it as a black-owned business; there isn’t that much capital," Johnson said. "You have to do it as a white-owned business with black management."

The lack of available resources has led several minority-owned media companies to sell to or merge with mainstream media companies (including the sale of Amistad Press to Harper-Collins; Essence Communications’ decision to form a joint venture with Time Inc. in October 2000; Time Warner’s purchase of Africana.com, an Internet portal that provides information on the history, culture and contemporary condition of Africa and its Diaspora, in September 2000; and, most recently, the purchase of BET by Viacom/CBS and Telemundo by GE/NBC this year). Minority consumers have openly protested the sale of minority-owned media to mainstream companies, noting the poor manner in which minorities have historically been portrayed in the media, and expressing the need for minority media owned and operated by minorities themselves.