Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander (Manglify), Esq.

Terry College of Business

University of Georgia
 

Hunter Thompson, the journalist and author who once ran for sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, who only did drugs if they began with a letter of the alphabet, and who consequently was thought (mistakenly) to be a few fries short of a Happy Meal, was never more scathingly perceptive than when he put TV in his crosshairs.
"The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs." Whatever we may think of television in America, this much is certain: it's not good when someone who has abused his mind and body as much as Hunter Thompson has comes up with something this honest and brilliant about the medium. It sets a bad example for the kids of America. How can grownups tell them drugs are bad when they see what they've done for Thompson, a man who glided through the 1960s thinking acid was a health food?

However many brain cells Thompson might have lost over the years, in the summer of 1999 his classic description of the TV business was proven true—again. That's when America's oldest and most respected civil rights organization, the NAACP, took a long, hard look down that plastic hallway and didn't like what it saw.
All it could see at CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox was a cadre of likeminded Moguls—the Titans of Television—the people who shape our pop culture by deciding what gets on the prime-time TV schedule and what doesn't. As far as the NAACP was concerned, these white liberals were behaving like a gang of rednecks decked out in Armanis who might as well have been fronting for David Duke.

NAACP president Kweisi Mfame said the TV business was "the most segregated industry in the United States." Other civil rights leaders accused the Moguls of whitewashing, even ethnic purification. This is the kind of language usually reserved for the Klan and leaders of the Third Reich. Not the Beverly Hills crowd.

What set off the NAACP was the networks' new fall schedules, of all things, which in the view of Kweisi Mfume didn't feature enough black characters (or Hispanic or Asian or other minority characters) in big roles on the networks' sitcoms and dramas.

You can make a case, of course, that instead of complaining the NAACP should have been celebrating. This is how Michael Medved, the mildly conservative social critic with uncommon sense, put it in USA Today:
Imagine for a moment that all of the nation's broadcast executives took boycott and legal threats of NAACP president Kweisi Mfume instantly to heart. They immediately agree to multiply many times over the number of people of color depicted on prime-time TV series. Suddenly, the percentage of black protagonists soars to more than 20 percent—well beyond the 13 percent of the population identified as African-American.

But as part of this happy fantasy, also assume that everything else about network television's offerings remains exactly the same—the same crudeness, rudeness, mindlessness, sniggering sex references, immaturity, exploitation and emphasis on instant gratification. Would merely adjusting the skin color of some prominent characters significantly alter the nature of television itself—and automatically improve its impact on black people?

The Moguls weren't interested in  questions like that. What they were interested in was heading off trouble. Boycotts and pickets are bad for business. So even though they tend to dismiss criticism from the Right
about how television's "crudeness, rudeness, mindlessness, [and] sniggering sex references" affect the culture, that summer they were far more sympathetic—and far more fearful!—of their friends on the Left. So they gave their solemn word as television Moguls to do better.

"This is something we're paying attention to," Fox Entertainment president Doug Herzog somberly announced.
"We realize there's still work' to be done," was NBC's earnest reply,
"In May we acknowledged that our new fall programming wasn't as ethnically diverse as we would have liked," was ABC's apologia.
CBS, along with all the other major networks, understandably concerned that their TV studios would be surrounded by pickets chanting, "No Justice, No Peace," promised to add more minority characters to its programs as soon as possible.

What the Moguls did not say, amidst all the promises to do better, was that they're in business to make money, that everything they do in their plastic hallways is about making money, that Hunter Thompson, that troublemaking, acid-popping weirdo had picked just the right words to describe what they already knew:
Didn't those NAACP-types understand—the Moguls don't keep blacks off of their sitcoms because they don't like black people? They keep them off the air because they make more. money with white people.
In the immortal words of James "Cueball" Carville: "It's the economy, stupid!"

Advertisers like white audiences. They have more money to spend. Robert Johnson, a black Mogul who heads the Black Entertainment Network, said what the white Moguls wouldn't.
"If I'm a network executive, who's probably white... and I'm going to launch a show that I think advertisers will like because it will deliver a white audience that the advertisers value more, I'm not going to go and try to do something risky and creative with black people and white people," he said. ‘I'm certainly going to stay away from black-and-white sex, so that takes out any romance stories involved with black men and white women. I'll probably take out any show that shows a black man as a dynamic businessman, sort of lording over white people, because that's going to offend the angry white male."

TV executives populate their little make-believe world with white stars because they believe that white adults, by and large, would rather watch white stars, by and large—Cosby and Winfrey being more the exceptions that prove the rule.

And there's plenty of evidence to support that belief. I looked at the ratings from Nielsen Media Research for the second quarter of 1999 (March 29-June 27)—just before the NAACP leveled its charges against the networks—and found that almost none of the top shows among black viewers were watched by white viewers—and vice versa:
•The top program that black viewers watched was The SteveHarvey Show on WB. Among whites, it ranked 150th.
• The number two show among blacks was For Your Love, also on WB. It ranked 145th among whites.
• The Jamie Foxx Show (WB) finished third among blacks; it also ranked 145th among whites.
• The Wayans Brothers (WB) was number six with black viewers; 142nd with whites.

And while blacks were watching shows starring black people, whites were watching shows starring white people:

• The number one show in America among white viewers during the second quarter of 1999 was Frasier, the NBC show about two annoyingly effete brothers, both psychiatrists, who know more about Italian art of the Renaissance than they do about the World Series. Among blacks, Frasier finished 105th. What a surprise!
• ER was the second biggest show with white viewers. It finished 22nd among blacks.
• Friends, the show about four beautiful white yuppies, finished 3rd with whites, 102nd with blacks.
• Veronica's Closet came in 4th among white viewers, 92nd with blacks.
• Will & Grace was 5th with whites, 112th with blacks.

When it comes to the world of television, especially sitcom television, there really are two Americas—one white, the other black. Except on Monday nights in the fall. Monday Night Football, unlike almost every other show on TV, does well with both blacks and whites.

So does Touched by an Angel, a show on CBS that seems to touch audiences regardless of race. Touched by an Angel features Della Reese, the black singer and actress, as one of several angels who visit people in their daily lives and provide them with spiritual guidance. The show finished seventh in the Nielsens with white viewers, twelfth with blacks.

 Frasier NBC
 1
 105

ER  NBC
 2
 22

Friends  NBC
 3
 102

Veronica's Closet  NBC
 4
 92

Will & Grace  NBC
 5
 112

Home Improvement   ABC
 6
 64

60 Minutes   CBS
 7
 26

Touched by an Angel  CBS
 7 (tie)
 12

Law & Order   NBC
 9
 17

CBS Sunday Movie  CBS
 10
 11

 Program Name
Network
Black Rank   White Rank

Harvey Show WB
 1
 150

For Your Love  WB
 2
 145

Jamie Foxx   WB
 3
 145 (tie)

PJ's   FOX
 4
 108

Walker, Texas Ranger  CBS
 5
 50

Wayans Brothers   WB
 6
 143

PJ's (Special)  FOX
 7
 109

Moesha  UPN
 8
 105

Smart Guy   WB
 9
 139

Sons of Thunder   CBS
 10
 56

Source: Nielsen Media Research/March 29-June 27,1999

   And by early 2001, two new shows crossed the racial divide: Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Survivor finished first among white viewers and seventeenth among blacks. Millionaire was third with whites, fourteenth with blacks.

So, is there a lesson here that goes beyond a color-blind fascination with athletes and angels and so-called "reality" and million-dollar game shows? Will blacks and whites—in large numbers—watch a show that features both blacks and whites? If TV shows were less segregated, would more people watch?

Maybe.

In 2001, Law & Order, The Practice, and ER—all smart, well-written dramas with racially mixed casts—finished in the top twenty with both black and white audiences.

But what if Frasier and Steve Harvey did a show together? What if half the friends on Friends were black? Would the audience be much bigger or much smaller? In other words, would more blacks watch Frasier and Friends—or would fewer whites watch? Or, to put it another way, how much integration is too much integration in the make-believe world of television?

I don't know. But I'm pretty sure about this: We're not about to find out anytime soon. The Moguls won't tamper with success. Friends and Frasier are gold mines. Bring a few blacks into those neighborhoods, and you run the risk of massive white flight. And that would mean lower ratings, which would mean less ad revenue, which would mean—and this is the really important part—the Moguls could become ex-Moguls overnight. And that—not looking out for Number One—is the only real sin in the plastic hallways where the Moguls conduct the business of television.

So, while the Moguls on the Left Coast support virtually every item on the liberal agenda, while they embrace diversity and affirmative action and deplore segregation in the real world, in the summer of 1999 they stood accused of practicing racial separation in the TV world they controlled. That may make them hypocrites, but does it really make them racists and ethnic purifiers, the way the NAACP meant it?

I don't think so.

If the networks' research departments did studies discovering that  ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox could make more money with black shows than with white shows, the whole fall lineup would look like Harlem. All the friends on Friends would be black. Everyone on Cheers would have been black.

If someone discovered that Eskimo shows got bigger ratings and more advertising revenue, the geniuses at the networks would change Frasier's name to Nanook.

ER would be set in Alaska.

They're not bigots, these Titans who control so much of our pop culture. They give money to charity and they love their families. They're just businessmen doing what businessmen do. It's in their nature to make the bottom line the top priority. The color they care most about is green. What could be more American than that?

Unfair?

How else should we explain CBS's shameless decision to put Howard Stern on its owned and operated TV stations on Saturday night? CBS airs Howard Stern because the TV show costs next to nothing to produce and brings in lots of money. So what if the show is filled with farting contests and women shaving their pubic hair? If the Tiffany Network would sink that low for money, it shouldn't surprise anyone that it would toss a few black folks over the side for a single rating point.

This is no bulletin, of course, to anybody who knows how the TV business works. The cultural liberals believe in civil rights as all decent Americans do. They just believe in their own success more. They like living in Beverly Hills and driving new Jaguars and Mercedes. Who wouldn't? And they're not going to give it all up by putting any more blacks (or other minorities) on TV than they absolutely have to.

For what it's worth, a black actor in Los Angeles, Damon Standifer, had a completely different theory on why there are so few blacks on TV. In the Los Angeles Times on June 28, 1999, he wrote: "Every type of 'black' show has been protested [by black activists]; If a show portrays wealthy black people, it's criticized for ignoring the plight of poor ones. If a show features poor black people... it's criticized for stereotyping black people as poor....

In past years there were complaints that the TV show Seinfeld never featured a black lead. But honestly, which
Seinfeld lead could have been cast as an African-American without drawing protests from [black critics]: The spastic, bug-eyed Kramer? The chronically unemployed, lazy George? The sexually promiscuous, self-centered Elaine? Had these characters been black, Seinfeld wouldn't have lasted one season."

The Moguls didn't have anything to say about that. But within months, network executives were falling all over themselves adding minority characters to their prime-time lineups. And NBC even promised to add at
least one minority writer to any show that survived its first season.

You've got to hand it to the NAACP. It had actually portrayed Hollywood, one of the most liberal communities in the solar system, as racist. Kweisi Mfume and his organization had some of the toughest guys in town apologizing all over the place. As my old friend John Leo, of U.S. News & World Report, put it, "If these people [network executives] are hard-core racists, systematically excluding blacks and other minorities in the entertainment business, we have some stop-the-press news."

But while the NAACP was busy accusing the Moguls of segregation, there was another kind of ethnic purification going on in the plastic hallways of the television business. This time, it had nothing to do with make-believe shows in Hollywood. This time, the whitewashing was going on in the sacred halls of the network news divisions in New York.

The dirty little secret is this: the top producers and executives who decide what stories get on the air don't want blacks on their prime-time news magazines any more than the Moguls in Hollywood want them in their prime-time sitcoms.

And the news elites—despite their devotion to equality and all that—don't want Hispanics on their magazine shows, either. Or poor people- no matter what color they are.

I'm not talking about the race or ethnicity of reporters. At all the networks, there's a real commitment to get black and other minority journalists on the air. This is about the real-life characters whose stories are told on shows like 48 Hours and Dateline and 20/20, the programs that, because they're much cheaper to produce than Hollywood dramas, can make the networks a lot of money if they get big enough ratings.

The line I heard over and over again at CBS News and from several sources at NBC was, "They're not our audience. They don't watch us."

There was a feeling that if the characters were black or Hispanic or lower class, "our [CBS News] audience" wouldn't be able to identify with them or care about their problems, because CBS news viewers are mostly older white people who live away from the big cities.

Just like the Moguls on the West Coast, when money is on the line, when their jobs and their hefty salaries are at stake, the liberal news media do what money demands.

The problem is that, over the years, news has morphed into entertainment. To the network brass, Dateline is the same as ER or Friends. They all have to compete for prime-time audiences. At CBS, 48 Hours is the
same as Everybody Loves Raymond. At ABC, 20/20 is on the exact same prime-rime schedule as The Practice and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

They’re all shows! They all have to get good ratings to survive. News isn't special, the way it was in the early days of television. News magazines aren't on the air to perform some public service. Maybe they were when 60 Minutes got started, but not anymore. Prime-time news magazines are on TV to make money, just like everything else on television.

So they have to play by entertainment's rules.

They have to be watched by people who have money to spend on products that are advertised on those shows. So they do what the Hollywood Moguls do. They make sure their characters appeal to their audience, which in the world of big network television means the more middle-class white people the better.

If black people were big consumers of news magazine shows, then the network producers would have some incentive to find stories about black people. But are they? Do blacks watch news magazines in big enough numbers for the mostly white producers in New York, who always have ratings on their minds, to put black people on the air?

The answer is—not really.

According to Nielsen, during that same second quarter of 1999, six of the top twenty-five shows among white viewers were news magazines. But none of those shows finished in the top twenty-five with black viewers.
 White Rank
Black Rank
Program Name
60 Minutes
 7
 26

Dateline Monday
 12
 81

20/20 Wednesday
 14
 35

Dateline Friday
 14 (tie)
 85

Dateline Tuesday
 14 (tie)
 55

20/20 Friday
 21
 38
 

So just as the West Coast big shots don't want too many blacks as main
characters on Frasier or Friends, the news Moguls don't want too many
black characters in stories on 48 Hours or Dateline or 20/20—and for
the exact same reason: white audiences want to see characters who look
like they do. People they can identify with. Joyce Maynard, the novelist,
calls it "the virtually endless fascination most of us feel for watching
ourselves and our neighbors on television."

Or as a producer at 48 Hours puts it, "All we do around here is murder, murder, murder, murder, sex. And only about white people."

That producers talk this way is only a secret to outsiders, to the civilians in the audience. At the networks, inside the news magazines, it's no secret at all. I spoke to many producers who, with only slight variations, told the same story: White characters appeal to more viewers than black characters. More viewers mean higher ratings. So we pick white characters whenever we can!

Av Westin, a producer who worked with Ed Murrow at CBS and ran 20/20 in the 1980s for ABC, did a survey (in 2000) of network journalists for the Freedom Forum and came to the same conclusion. One source told him, "We do not feature black people. I mean, it's said.  Actually, they whisper it, 'Is she white?"'

Over the years, I picked up tidbits just like that from producers I worked with, stories that were told over dinner or in the car on the way to a story. I won't share their names in order to protect the innocent.Bad things happen to news people who tell stories about their own newsrooms, especially when the stories are embarrassingly true.
In 1999, I was shooting a story for 48 Hours about kids who were in jail for serious, violent crimes, including murder. The main character in the piece was a teenage black girl. The senior staff in New York didn't know she was black but were suspicious. So one New York producer asked the field producer, "What is she?" meaning what color or ethnic group is she.

"She's black," the producer told his boss in New York, "but she's light-skinned.” He felt he had to say that to get the okay to proceed with the story. If she were just plain old black, the New York brass might have balked and told him to find another character, meaning another character who wasn't black. He was embarrassed about the incident because he knew how it sounded.

Another 48 Hours producer told me about a Hispanic man with a slight accent who was edited out of his story before it aired. Was the man understandable? I asked him. "Absolutely. Totally." Then why did they edit him out? "Because they don't think our audience cares about Hispanics."

This concern for race and ethnicity is common knowledge at 48 Hours. One producer told me he would be asked, '"What racial background are these people?' They were not subtle at all. They made it pretty damn clear to me that 'we want stories with white folks.'"

"It was tough to take," he went on, and it was the "most explosive piece of inside information I was privy to."
What information exactly was that? I asked him.
"That it was racist."

Another producer, who has worked at several networks, told me that when he worked in the CBS News Dallas bureau, there was "a general understanding" that the Evening News didn"'t want stories about Mexicans or Indians. "Why not?" I asked him. The answer: "They think nobody cares about them."

An NBC News correspondent told me that "a white rags to riches story will make it [on a magazine program] far more quickly than a black rags to riches story." Why? "Let's not kid ourselves," he said, "these shows make a tremendous amount of money. There's no profit in people of color."

These paragons of liberalism who run the magazine shows aren't just afraid of turning off their mostly white audiences by putting minorities on the air, they're also worried about scaring their viewers with ugly people!
I have a memo entitled "'48 Hours Survival Guide." It's an unsigned but serious three-page paper handed out to the producers on the staff, outlining what makes a good 48 Hours story. In it, I found this gem: "Looks count, too. This is television after all. You can find the most articulate character in the world but if she has no teeth or has a beard, no one will hear what she is saying. Therefore you must ALWAYS meet your character in person BEFORE any shoot."

Since there aren't that many toothless or bearded women out there, what the memo is really saying is: No Fat Chicks with Big Noses on 48 Hours—presumably, even if one is a doctor who just found a cure for cancer.
We wouldn't want to frighten our viewers, now, would we?

In the spring of 2000, I launched an experiment. During the May "sweeps," one of the key months when ratings are used to determine how much the networks can charge for future commercials, I monitored all the editions of 20/20 (10 shows, 26 stories), 48 Hours (6 shows, 12 stories), 60 Minutes (4 shows, 12 stories), and Dateline (15 shows, 39 stories)—35 programs in all, 89 stories—to see if, and to what extent, the news media elites were whitewashing their magazine shows.

There were hundreds of characters in the stories, but I was only interested in the main characters, the ones the stories were about. Here's what I found:

Dateline ran stories about every titillating subject under the sun, which is what TV magazines routinely do during sweeps. They did pieces on prostitutes in Eastern Europe... about Rave parties where kids dance and take drugs... they ran "A family reunion you'll never forget"... they had a story about lie detectors... about kicking the smoking habit... about testosterone... about killer tornadoes... about people who survived car wrecks and fires... there was a story about air-conditioning units called "Silent Killer"... there was a piece about a nasty dog breeder... and, of course, there was the mandatory "murder mystery" involving the death of a little girl.

So how many blacks were featured as main characters in those fifteen Dateline shows that aired thirty-nine stories? A grand total of... zero!

South Africa in the bad old days was more integrated than Dateline during sweeps!

How about 48 Hours? There was a show called "It's Just Sex," about what Dan Rather called "The New Sexual Revolution." There was a show about doctors who take unnecessary risks with their patients. And there were plenty of murder shows: a "seventy-seven-year-old grandmother hot on the trail of a killer"... "newlyweds  murdered in their small hometown"... two unsolved murders that we will "Never Forget"... and "A 48 Hours Mystery'" about a woman charged with murdering her own mother. Blacks? None in the entire sweeps month. Not one. Same as Dateline.

20/20 had stories about; a serial killer... a scorned wife and the "temptress" who stole her husband... a guy who gets shot out of a cannon ... a doctor who carved his initials on a patient... a rape victim trying to keep her attacker in prison... a young man charged with killing his best friend in the desert... a pedophile... an alleged thief who swindled insurance companies... and a girl who killed her mother, "a daughter's dark side." Of the twenty-six stories 20/20 ran on ten hours' worth of shows, two of the main characters were black. One of the stories was about Secretary of Defense William Cohen and, as Barbara Walters put it, "his stunning wife Janet," who is black. As I watched I couldn't help but think that if she wasn't so stunning—which she most certainly was—20/20 might not have found her interesting enough to put on TV during sweeps.

And then there's 60 Minutes, the show that marches to its own drummer. 60 Minutes was on four times during sweeps with twelve stories. Seven of them featured black people as main characters.

About five months later, in its October 2000 issue, Brill's Content did a story about two black producers who quit their jobs at Dateline because they were convinced that stories about black people were seen by network news executives as "not marketable." As part of the story, Brill's Content conducted the same survey as I did during the May sweeps and came up with the same numbers. But Brill went a step further. Its reporter also surveyed the same news magazine shows in June, a less important month because sweeps had already ended. The author of the piece, Robert Schmidt, found an interesting difference.

Dateline, which had no blacks on in May, had three "blacks in key roles" in June, out of sixty stories.
20/20 which had two blacks on in May, had eight major black characters, on in June, in forty-two stories.
48 Hours, which had no blacks on in May, had four on in June, in forty stories. And 60 Minutes, which had seven black main characters on during sweeps, had two on in the fifteen stories it ran in June.

The Brill's Content piece also pointed out that over the years, "Each one [of the news magazine shows] has done solid stories on blacks or other minorities."

America is a country where race only divides, Shelby Steele wrote in The Content of Our Character. So maybe it's unreasonable to think that TV news executives would do better in racial matters than presidents and senators and even well-meaning, everyday Americans have been able to do in the past.

In the old days, on programs like 48 Hours, we did dark shows on crime and punishment. And many of the characters we showed were black.

When crack was new, we showed black men selling it on street corners.
When we showed young schoolgirls having babies, many of the young schoolgirls we showed were black.
When we showed suspects being handcuffed and loaded into police cars, the ones we showed were often black.
But when we realized this emphasis on black people doing destructive things was excessive, we went to the other extreme. To atone for past sins, we tried not to show any blacks in a bad light. Such was the power of images, we believed, that showing even one black man in handcuffs would somehow slander all black men.

And when TV news magazines began to clone themselves in the 1990s, when we saw what a gold mine they were, we became very practical. We made secret, unofficial pacts—understandings, really, that didn't need to be formalized with anything more than a knowing look, if that—to marginalize blacks and other minorities and, of course, poor people, no matter what color they were.

This wasn't about sensitivity anymore, or political correctness. It wasn't about not wanting to show certain Americans in a bad light. It was about not wanting to show certain Americans at all, if we could get away with it.
Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame," the great CBS News documentary about poor migrant families traveling America, trying to survive by picking fruits and vegetables, would never be done today. Too many poor people. Not our audience. We want the people who buy cars and computers. Poor migrants won't bring our kind of Americans—the ones with money to spend—into the tent. This is how the media's "Liberals of Convenience" operate. These are the people who can spot a bigot a hundred miles away. But what they refuse to see is that they're the ones behaving just like Archie Bunker when he found out the Jeffersons were moving next door. Archie didn't really dislike black people. They just made him feel... uncomfortable. And besides, they
brought property values down in the neighborhood, didn't they? What's a guy to do?

The Liberals of Convenience don't dislike blacks. Or Hispanics. Or poor people. Quite the opposite. They like them very much—in theory. They just don't want too many of them on their TV shows. This is what happens when entertainment and news get too chummy, when the so-called values of one become the values of the other.

This is how the game is played in the shallow money trench and the plastic hallway.
 
 
 

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                                         Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander