Sheila Johnson, the ex-wife of Robert Johnson and co-founder of BET(Black Entertainment Television) stated that she's ashamed of BET. Here's a quote of what she said in an article from The Daily Beast, dated April 29, 2010.
“Don’t even get me started,” says the 60-year-old Johnson, who has since divorced and remarried (charmingly enough, to the Virginia circuit court judge who presided over her divorce). “I don’t watch it. I suggest to my kids [a twentysomething daughter and a college-age son] that they don’t watch it… I’m ashamed of it, if you want to know the truth.”
“Society and government really believe [the AIDS] problem has gone away. People don’t know that this disease is still around.”
Johnson—who was at the Tribeca Film Festival this week for the premiere of The Other City, a searing, but ultimately hopeful documentary she produced about the AIDS epidemic in Washington, D.C.—says BET is making matters worse, and potentially contributing to the spread of AIDS, by promoting promiscuous, unprotected sex in raunchy late-night rap videos.
It wasn’t always that way. “When we started BET, it was going to be the Ebony magazine on television,” Johnson tells me. “We had public affairs programming. We had news… I had a show called Teen Summit, we had a large variety of programming, but the problem is that then the video revolution started up… And then something started happening, and I didn’t like it at all. And I remember during those days we would sit up and watch these videos and decide which ones were going on and which ones were not. We got a lot of backlash from recording artists…and we had to start showing them. I didn’t like the way women were being portrayed in these videos.”
This coming from a husband and wife, whom chose to eliminate the positive programming and focus on negative, violent, and sexist music videos before selling BET to Viacom. Viacom sought after BET because of it's huge viewership. Within such influence, lies a power to say no to negative imagery, music, and entertainment. Just imagine if BET focused on it's news and educational programming, music videos that catered to creativity instead of negative stereotypes, and simply entertainment that uplifted the viewers.
So please do not blame the monster for its problems that you created. The emtire article can be seen here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-29/sheila-johnsons-fight-against-hiv-in-dc/
I want to hear from the masses.......
