Bad BET

    Now let’s see if I can get this right, black voters are supposed to listen to Robert L. Johnson, who is unarguably the biggest sell out in African American history? Or does he think ethnic memory has come and gone in a flash?
    Just in case, here’s a quick review of why Bob Johnson’s opinion isn’t worth the time it took to spew it out. When he owned BET, he sold black Americans cheap by providing the most low rent, low brow content available on the boob tube, mainly a steady diet of raunchy rap music videos, which he got for free, and black sitcom reruns, which he got for next to nothing. He dumped Emerge Magazine, which was well-edited and featured stories by some of the best black journalists in the nation, because it wasn’t making enough money. He neither expressed nor demonstrated much interest in seriously investing in the collective future of black America.
    Still, as inadequate as his Black Entertainment Television cable network was, it WAS a major black-owned media outlet. I say was because when Viacom came-a-calling, Johnson became the $3 billion sellout–the legacy of black American institutions be damned.
    So now, America's first black billionaire, whose principal principle is money, is asking us not to support Barack Obama, who would be America's first black president.  We're supposed to gamble on Johnson's commitments. And he's supposed to be taken seriously when he sets his stake in the Clinton campaign while trivializing the front-running African American candidate? Just as Hillary last week trivialized Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s role in the establishment of civil rights laws in the 1960s, giving the credit instead to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Her ill-advised remark tarnished the Clintons-good-for-blacks patina.
    Except in billionaire Bob’s mind: “As an African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues . . . ”
    I’m not sure what Hillary plans to do for black America. I know that Bill may have done for black America more than Bob Johnson set out to do, but I also know that Clinton didn’t do us a lot of good when he was in the Oval Office. He mainly looked good to us because he served between the Bushes.
    I’ll explore that reality before the week is out.