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Why is the Black Press (NNPA) selling out to AT&T & Consolidation?

March 31, 2011 By

The other day I spoke about how the current political climate is no longer about Dems vs Repubs. Instead its really about the rich and Wanna be Rich vs the working class and poor. I deliberately use the word ‘wanna be rich‘ because that’s the weak link and where most of the damage is done.

Corporate heads are small in number less than (10%) yet control anywhere from 80-90% of the wealth. The average CEO in the US makes 319-475 for every dollar earned by his/her workforce. In places like Japan, home to the world’s second largest economy the ratio is 11-1. In Germany its 12-1. You can peep those figures HERE.

What these CEOs have done is invested in large media companies and PR firms where they do two things, lay out attack after attack on the American workforce, in particular unions. The line has been to blame workers receiving pensions and health benefits for the collapse of the economy vs uber rich CEOs outsourcing their jobs to impoverished countries and hiding their money in offshore tax shelters.

These CEOs then entice charismatic and highly visible figures or organizations receiving funding aka ‘Wannabe Rich’ who wish to court favor to be the average John Doe ‘talking head‘ for their anti-worker/ pro corporate policies. They help create fictional boogey men against the working poor which is then propagandized all over the airwaves. We seen this happen over the issue of Net Neutrality, the bashing of unions and now with the proposed merger of telcom giant AT&T and T-Mobile.

In the AT&T deal we have the Black press (NNPA) of all people along with the National Urban League supporting the consolidation of a major industry most of us have to use in some form or fashion.. I find it ironic that a group of media folks who have seen first hand the sickening impact consolidation has both on the media industry and our community at large would team up and support a major consolidator.

Thank God our friends at the Black Agenda Report go in on these corporate lackeys and breakdown the lunacy of them supporting consolidation..We salute BAR for a job well done. Thanks for holding the line and not selling out the community for three pieces of silver.

-Davey D-

What’s the mission of the black press? To hear Walter Smith, CEO of the NY Beacon and NNPA Budget Chairman, it’s to rep their advertisers, and increase their “corporate visibility.” What happened to informing the pubic, to defending the interests of black communities, to telling the truth without fear or favor? Last week we denounced NNPA’s craven endorsement of AT&T’s buyout of T-Mobile, which will concentrate three-quarters of the US cell phone market in the hands of two massive and massively predatory corporations. They answered.

NNPA Defends Endorsement of Predatory AT&T -T-Mobile Merger. And We Answer

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Bruce Dixon

Last week I excoriated the NNPA, the National Newspaper Publishers Association for its instantaneous and craven endorsement of AT&T’s proposal to buy out T-Mobile. The proposed merger would give two companies, AT&T and Verizon, three quarters of the U.S. cell phone market. I listed nine reasons why the Justice Department and FCC and Congress should reject the merger, and especially why black and brown civic and leadership organizations ought to oppose it.

Since then, the National Urban League, the NAACP, both heavily dependent on AT&T and Verizon for charitable donations, rushed to endorse the merger. And Walter Smith, CEO of the New York Beacon and NNPA Budget Chairman took the time to write and take issue with us. We thank him for his letter, which you can find here, and take this opportunity to answer it.

Dear Mr. Smith,

Walter Smith NNPA

Thank you for taking the time to write us here at Black Agenda Report. In my article last week I listed nine reasons why the AT&T merger was bad economics, bad public policy and especially disastrous for black and poor communities. Regrettably your response addressed none of those points.

You began by preaching that “…Mergers, acquisitions, re-organizations, etc is the corporate building blocks of the US economy.…” That’s nonsense.

Any reputable economist, and by that I mean any economist who predicted the crash and bailout of 2008 will tell you that there is a real economy in which things are built and services rendered, and there is a parasitic “economy” in which rents and interest payments are extracted, corporate welfare is handed out, and public assets are privatized. Corporate mergers are obviously parasitic. As I pointed out last week, corporate mergers produce no new assets, they eliminate jobs and raise prices. They are anti-competitive, bad for customer service and a disincentive to innovation.

This is not a small thing. It’s such a fundamental misstatement of economic fact that it calls into question your willingness and/or your ability to tell the truth to your readers. And make no mistake, Mr. Smith, the will and the ability of the black press to tell the truth without fear or favor is what this is all about.

Your letter continued to say

NNPA has a long standing relationship with AT&T and it has become more significant with the relationship our present Chairman has with the hierarchy of the corporation…

The Black Press of America, represented by NNPA is not a WATCHDOG, it is a communicator. We report the news and record black history. Publishers editorialize about issues that affect the communities they serve.

“NNPA has a partnership with AT&T that has yielded benefits for the black community in ways you cannot see nor imagine. Black newspaper publishers hire local community photographers, writers, distributors, office personnel,and local printers. Our revenue for these jobs comes from our advertising revenues. Where does much of these revenues come from? You guessed it, AT&T and Verizon.”

Sadly, I could not have said it better. Your vision of the black press is that of “communicator” on behalf of those corporations who give you advertising revenue, which you use to pay a handful of contractors and staff.

This is a profoundly different mission for the black press, for journalism in general, than the framers of the Constitution had in mind. Journalism was the only industry that got its own constitutional amendment precisely because democracy depended on journalists faithfully and fearlessly informing the public.

Frederick Douglass

You have radically departed also from the mission of the black press of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Frederick Douglass preached and organized tirelessly, first against slavery, then for Reconstruction, and finally against lynching and Jim Crow. Ida B. Wells carried this legacy on into the twentieth century. The mission of the black press in those days was first to allow us to speak with and to hear our own voices, not those our masters appointed to speak for or to us, and secondly to defend black interests by fearlessly exposing injustice of all kinds. The black press of those days was truly a weapon of mass discussion. But no longer, as your letter points out:

No the Black Press ain’t what it used to be. Its a new day for the Black Press under New leadership with an experienced entrepreneur who has the business acumen to negotiate a financial partnership with corporate America and does not sell out one Black person in doing so.

If you want to fight the merger, by all means do so. However the black press does not need your input nor approval on the position we take be it political or financial. The Black Press is still operating under the same creed as it did in 1827, “We wish to plead our own cause, Too long have others spoken for us.”

Your position on the AT&T merger is indeed selling out millions of black people. Pretty much everybody who pays a cell phone bill will pay a higher one thanks to this merger. Thousands of jobs, many held by black people, will disappear. The tens of billions AT&T might have spent extending wireless and broadband service to poor, black, brown and rural communities will go instead to buy out its competition.

If your job, Brother Smith, is to report the news, then you should report news, not be the sock puppet for your advertisers. If your mission is to “record black history,” you get a choice there too. You can write that history from the viewpoint of ordinary black families, or you can write it from the viewpoint of your corporate advertisers and donors.

The New York Beacon, where you are CEO is about as good as black newspapers get these days. Most offer far less non-advertising, non-entertainment copy. Many are entirely composed of ads, PR handouts from local governments, corporations and other institutions, wire service copy from Reuters, AP, and sometimes NNPA, and entertainment fluff.

How many NNPA newspapers have bothered to educate the public on the fact that text messaging, because it rides on the otherwise empty communication packets between phones and network servers, costs cell phone providers literally nothing, though they have regularly raised prices on this service? Not a one. How many NNPA newspapers have explained to audiences that the artificial broadband scarcities of the digital divide are a basic and permanent feature of telecom company business models from Comcast to Verizon to AT&T, and even reaching back into era of analog telephone service?

One of the reasons that Americans, including black ones, are the best entertained and least informed people on earth is your abandonment of the core mission of journalism, lack of interest in an informed public, the very reason for the existence of journalism.

Your letter concludes thusly:

As a result of Chairman Bakewell’s tenure with NNPA, we have increased our visibility in corporate America, have increased revenues to the association, have increased advertising revenues to our member publishers, have regained credibility with the readership, and have increased membership in the organization. Have you done as much for Black Agenda Report?”

Evidently Mr. Smith, you have confused your own business model with the public good of our black communities.

The telecom industry spreads a lot of charitable contributions and advertising revenue around. It rains cash upon utilizes legacy African Americans like the NAACP, the Urban League and your NNPA, and funds wholly astroturf outfits like ADE, the Alliance for Digital Equality. It uses you, and them, to hurl false and spurious accusations of white racism against national media reform organizations like Free Press who advocate network neutrality and the extension of broadband to black, brown and poor communities.

Black Agenda Report is doing what you should be doing, Mr. Smith. We are commited to educating the public on the facts, not increasing our corporate visibility and raking in the maximum ad revenue. We are committed to gathering 50,000 signatures of black people, and all people on a petition to stop this ill-advised merger, and presenting that petition to the FCC, to the Congressional Black Caucus, to the National Conference of Black State Legislators, to the White House and the Justice Department later this year demanding that this predatory, anti-competitive merger be halted.

We invite all who read this to help prove you wrong by signing the petition themselves, and forwarding it to as many of your friends, neighbors, co-workers and associates as possible. You may also want to forward this article from last week, which outlines nine reasons why the merger is a very bad idea.

Respectfully,

As I said last week, Ida B. Wells, the champion of the black press in the early 20th century, is rolling in her grave. If she were alive today we both know what side she’d be on.

Respectfully,

Bruce A. Dixon

managing editor, Black Agenda Report

bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com

Filed Under: 2011 Daily News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Pres Obama’s FCC Throws Another Constituency Thrown Under The Bus-Big Showdown Dec 21

December 15, 2010 By

After campaigning as a champion of network neutrality, President Obama has decisively broken yet another promise. The FCC votes December 21 on rules proposed by the president’s FCC chairman which will begin the transformation of the free and open internet into somethning much more like cable TV, with corporate control over content, and hundreds or thousands of “channels”, but not much worth watching.

President Obama’s FCC Sells Out on Network Neutrality – Another Constituency Thrown Under The Bus

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/president-obamas-fcc-sells-out-network-neutrality-%E2%80%93-another-constituency-thrown-under-bus

Bruce Dixon

Never mind the big tent,” declared a cartoon by the artist Mike Fluggenock during the 2008 presidential campaign. “There’s room for all” the caption declared “under Obama’s Big Bus.” A full two years after that historic election, it’s hard to name any part of the Democratic party’s base constituencies that President Obama has not decisively betrayed. Last week gays, women, blacks, Latinos, the environment, the peace movement, labor, the unemployed and a host of others were joined beneath the speeding wheels of the Obama bus by those millions of Americans who believe greedy corporations should not control what we see, hear, write and communicate over the internet.

President Obama campaigned on the promise that he would take a back seat to nobody in guaranteeing the free and open internet. Two years out, it’s abundantly clear thatu the president lied to us, and to the American people on network neutrality.

The pending merger between Comcast and NBC would create a gigantic corporation with both the motive and means to privilege the delivery of its own content over the enormous fraction of the internet that they own, and to slow down, inhibit, or apply surcharges to content originating from outside. Neither the administration’s Justice Department or FCC have lifted a finger to oppose it. So-called compromise rules announced last week by Obama’s FCC Chairman Julius Genachowki pay only the faintest lip service to the concept that the internet should be a common carrier available to all, and provide vast loopholes for internet providers to apply punitive charges to content and content providers they disfavor.

Thanks to the Obama administration, which once enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the media justice community, greedy telecom corporations will at last have their wish — that the internet will become a lot more like cable TV — five hundred, or five thousand channels, but nothing worth watching. The proposed FCC regulations will allow corporations even more power to control and restrict the content delivered via wireless broadband internet, thought to be the internet delivery technology of the future. Needless to say, the telecom and cable companies are well pleased. Their paid stooges at the Alliance for Digital Equality, the Minority Media Telecommunications Council, LULAC, the National Coalition for Black Civic Participation and the NAACP, and the Congressional Black Caucus are raking in telecom donations and cranking out press releases assuring us that giving their benefactors more control over the internet will create jobs and opportunities for all of us little people.

The five member FCC is scheduled to vote on the proposed rule changes on December 21. Certainly chairman Genachowski will vote for his own rules. Amazingly, it is possible that the two Republican commissioners may not because they object to any regulation of corporations whatsoever. Commissioners Kopps and Clyburn, however, are still thought to be staunch supporters of network neutrality, and should be contacted by email, phone or fax and asked to oppose the Obama proposal to let corporations control what we see, hear and send over the internet. This is a case when doing nothing is better than anything already on the table. For more information on what you can do, visit www.savetheinternet.com That’s www.savetheinternet.com.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon.

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Filed Under: 2010 Daily News, Political articles Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Historic Prison Strike in Georgia-Blacked out By Media-Guards committing Violence

December 12, 2010 By

We been covering this strike since Day 1… Its Day 6 and we continue.. This time with an insightful interview on Hard Knock Radio w/Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report.. He brings us up to speed by talking about some of the challenges the inmates are facing inlcuding brutality from the prison guards

Here’s the link to the interview..http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/66078

Here’s a link to the Democracy Now interview w/ Elaine Brown

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/14/prisoner_advocate_elaine_brown_on_georgia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8sdScqinkg


On Thursday morning, December 9, 2010, thousands of Georgia prisoners refused to work, stopped all other activities and locked down in their cells in a peaceful protest for their human rights. The December 9 Strike became the biggest prisoner protest in the history of the United States. Thousands of men, from Augusta, Baldwin, Hancock, Hays, Macon, Smith and Telfair State Prisons, among others, initiated this strike to press the Georgia Department of Corrections (“DOC”) to stop treating them like animals and slaves and institute programs that address their basic human rights.  They set forth the following demands:  

  • · A LIVING WAGE FOR WORK
  • · EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
  • · DECENT HEALTH CARE
  • · AN END TO CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENTS
  • · DECENT LIVING CONDITIONS
  • · NUTRITIONAL MEALS
  • · VOCATIONAL AND SELF-IMPROVEMENT OPPORTUNITIES
  • · ACCESS TO FAMILIES
  • · JUST PAROLE DECISIONS

Despite that the prisoners’ protest remained non-violent, the DOC violently attempted to force the men back to work—claiming it was “lawful” to order prisoners to work without pay, in defiance of the 13th Amendment’s abolition of slavery.  In Augusta State Prison, six or seven inmates were brutally ripped from their cells by CERT Team guards and beaten, resulting in broken ribs for several men, one man beaten beyond recognition.  This brutality continues there.  At Telfair, the Tactical Squad trashed all the property in inmate cells.  At Macon State, the Tactical Squad has menaced the men for two days, removing some to the “hole,” and the warden ordered the heat and hot water turned off.  Still, today, men at Macon, Smith, Augusta, Hays and Telfair State Prisons say they are committed to continuing the strike.  Inmate leaders, representing blacks, Hispanics, whites, Muslims, Rastafarians, Christians, have stated the men will stay down until their demands are addressed, one issuing this statement:

“…Brothers, we have accomplished a major step in our struggle…We must continue what we have started…The only way to achieve our goals is to continue with our peaceful sit-down…I ask each and every one of my Brothers in this struggle to continue the fight.  ON MONDAY MORNING, WHEN THE DOORS OPEN, CLOSE THEM.  DO NOT GO TO WORK.  They cannot do anything to us that they haven’t already done at one time or another.  Brothers, DON’T GIVE UP NOW.  Make them come to the table.  Be strong.  DO NOT MAKE MONEY FOR THE STATE THAT THEY IN TURN USE TO KEEP US AS SLAVES….”

When the strike began, prisoner leaders issued the following call: “No more slavery.  Injustice in one place is injustice to all. Inform your family to support our cause.  Lock down for liberty!”

Here’s the link to our recent Hard Knock Radio interview w/ Elaine Brown on this historic strike

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/65925

Here’s an article written by Bruce Dixon editor of the Black Agenda Report on the strike

GA Inmates Stage One Day Peaceful Prison Strike, Authorities React With Violence

http://www.correntewire.com/ga_inmates_stage_one_day_peaceful_prison_strike_authorities_react_violence

Bruce Dixon

In an action which is unprecedented on several levels, black, brown and white inmates of Georgia’s notorious state prison system are standing together for a historic one day peaceful strike today, during which they are remaining in their cells, refusing work and other assignments and activities. This is a groundbreaking event not only because inmates are standing up for themselves and their own human rughts, but because prisoners are setting an example by reaching across racial boundaries which, in prisons, have historically been used to pit oppressed communities against each other. PRESS RELEASE BELOW THE FOLD
The action is taking place today in at least half a dozen of Georgia’s more than one hundred state prisons, correctional facilities, work camps, county prisons and other correctional facilities. We have unconfirmed reports that authorities at Macon State prison have aggressively responded to the strike by sending tactical squads in to rough up and menace inmates.Outside calls from concerned citizens and news media will tend to stay the hand of prison authorities who may tend to react with reckless and brutal aggression. So calls to the warden’s office of the following Georgia State Prisons expressing concern for the welfare of the prisoners during this and the next few days are welcome.

Macon State Prison is 978-472-3900.

Hays State Prison is at (706) 857-0400

Telfair State prison is 229-868-7721

Baldwin State Prison is at (478) 445- 5218

Valdosta State Prison is 229-333-7900

Smith State Prison is at (912) 654-5000

The Georgia Department of Corrections is at http://www.dcor.state.ga.us and their phone number is 478-992-5246

This is all the news we have for now…

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner


Filed Under: 2010 Daily News, Political articles Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Top Ten Reasons Why Black Leaders Are Ignoring President Obama’s Attack on Social Security

November 18, 2010 By

After a decades-long drumbeat led by the Peterson Foundation, corporate media, Wall Street and their minions of both parties, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are under attack. The current raid is being led by nobody less than Barack Obama himself. Only Nixon could go to China, only Clinton could end welfare, and only a black Democrat can undermine Social Security. But where is black leadership? Why are they silent? We think we know…

Top Ten Reasons Why Black Leaders Are Ignoring President Obama’s Good Cop-Bad Cop Attack on Social Security

by BAR Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon

In the full week following the November 10 release of draft proposals by President Obama’s Commission on fiscal Responsibility, also known as the Cat Food Commission, the silence of black leadership has been deafening. Among other things, the president’s commission would cut Social Security benefits and exacerbate unemployment by raising the retirement age, would lower taxes still further for corporations and wealthy individuals, while instituting co-payments for all veterans medical services, all in the name of austerity and stabilizing the national deficit.

The president’s political strategy, as Glen Ford pointed out last month, is clear. Obama’s commission and its draconian cuts will be the bad cop. President Obama will then play the part of “good cop” offering some “compromise,” a point between actual hell, and just a very, very hot and uncomfortable place. When Bill Clinton did this, it was called “triangulation.”

But the burning question is this: Why is there no visible opposition among black leadership to these awful economic measures, measures which penalize every working and poor person in the United States? Since an outsize number of these are African Americans, that ought to make it a black issue. Nevertheless, black advocacy organizations, the black churches, who, to hear them tell it, were the sole authors and inventors of the Freedom Movement, along with virtually all the black politicians, journalists, academics and opinion leaders, are silent. Why?

We think we know. Hence and herewith, we offer the top ten reasons black leaders are silent on Obama’s campaign to cut Medicaid, Medicare and social security.

Reason #10

Quite a few black “leaders” have no idea the Cat Food Commission even exists.

This kind of radical cluelessness says a lot about the content and style of their “leadership.” Let’s just say their eyes are elsewhere. Watching God, maybe, in some cases.  Lots of prominent black preachers, for instance, are busy campaigning against gays and vying for faith-based funding for their ministries. Both these pursuits consume copious amounts of time and energy, and the latter can be quite lucrative

Reason #9

Some black leaders with a vague idea that the Cat Food Commission exists haven’t read its recommendations or just aren’t paying attention.

Like the ones who have no idea at all, these are busy and important people. You can’t expect such folks to spare the time to read a 50 page report, or even talk to anybody that has. There are just so many more important things to do.

Reason #8

Some others are silent because they DO KNOW the Cat Food Commission exists.

Black leadership these days, such as it is, is dependent on corporate and foundation largesse. SCLC’s Atlanta headquarters was paid for by a major utility company. The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation is run by corporate execs and puts on its annual CBC Week with funds from Wells fargo, Lockheed, Bank of America and Wal-Mart. Telecom, insurance and other corporate execs on the “business roundtables” of everyplace from the NAACP to the National Association of Black State Legislators fund the activities, provide the “research” and literally set the organizational priorities. Even the black church, once financed solely by contributions from the faithful, has become shamefully dependent on faith-based taxpayer dollars. The corporate sector which bankrolls them all has unalterably opposed Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare since their inception. None of these “leaders” will bite the hands that feed them.

Reason #7

Some of what are called “black leadership” actually believe the corporate okie-doke about Social Security already being insolvent, a Ponzi scheme, or immoral.

For a significant share of “black leadership” being a leader means getting your opinions from the Washington Post or CNN or the New York Times. These established “leaders” value being accepted by the folks they regard as their peers, their donors, their party leaders, their professional colleagues, golfing buddies and the people that fly them to conferences and endow their departments. Not foolish enough to bite the hands that feed them, many black leaders regard it as their job to take the cues of the business world and corporate media, rather than to respond to the multiple crises of debt, incarceration, housing and joblessness experienced by the great mass of ordinary black families. Corporate media and their peers say the deficit and “entitlements” are the problem, and plenty of “black leaders” actually buy this crap.

continue reading this over at Black Agenda Report

You can also peep the Hard Knock Radio Interview we did with Bruce Dixon by clicking the link below

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/65385

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Who Killed Black Radio-A Journalist Roundtable

May 26, 2009 By

daveydbanner

As word spreads about John Conyer’s Bill HR 848 conversations around the state of Black radio continue to emerge..many are feeling Conyer’s bill is some sort of savior because they hate the way radio has been sounding these days. Well bad news folks it isn’t.. Tune into the show jared ball put together and you’ll hear why..
-Davey D-

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Who Killed {Black} Radio?

A Journalists Roundtable

May 25, 2009 by freemixradio 

JaredBallbeigh-225This week’s “redux” featured a journalist roundtable discussion of HR 848 and the impact of payola, advertising and the politics of domination on media – Black radio in particular.

Bruce Dixon from BlackAgendaReport.com, DaveyD from DaveyD.com and Paul Porter from IndustryEars.com comprised the panel all offering the insight of nearly 100 years of journalistic/radio experience.

This was an extension of previous coverage of the issue which can be found here.

Part 2, below, included the return of Dr. Mark “Hate” Bolden for a discussion of The Fanon Project and an interview with Mrs. Tyra Simpkins of MS Y.A.N.A. (You Are Not Alone) – an African American multiple sclerosis empowerment group.

If you wish to stream this radio show head on over to Jared ball’s site Vox Union to get the feed there..

 http://www.voxunion.com/?p=1217

Download MP3!

Download MP3!

Below is an article from Bruce Dixon on this topic

Black Radio and the “Performance Rights” Toll Booth

by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon

Will Saving Black Radio Save Local News And Public Service?

A few weeks ago Radio One founder Cathy Hughes, echoed by Tom Joyner and dozens of other radio personalities, sounded the alarm. HR 848 they cried, a bill to make stations pay a “performance rights” fee for every song played, was a mortal threat to black radio. In a widely circulated blog post which was echo-blasted to everybody on any Radio One email list, Hughes cited black radio’s stellar contributions of news, diversity and local content as reasons why African American communities should rally to protect it. She even claimed black talk and gospel were “money losing formats” as if these were public services and tithes offered out of Radio One’s bottomless reservoir of corporate good will.

The laughter was pretty hard to suppress. Commentators like Paul Scott and Mark Anthony Neal ran columns titled “Should We Save Black Radio?” and “Should Black Radio Die?” to which they answered “probably not” and “maybe.”

The widely known fact, as BAR’s Glen Ford pointed out six years ago in “Who Killed Black Radio News” is that Radio One led the industry in purging news, public service and local content of all kinds from its airwaves in favor of cheap, syndicated, uninformed talk, mostly about celebrities and relationships. Radio One’s payola-influenced playlists are indistinguishable from its white-owned black radio competitors. Perhaps to protect their audiences from too many confusing facts, Tom Joyner, Cathy Hughes and the rest of the “save black radio” posse never mention that white broadcasters, the National Association of Broadcasters in fact, are just as opposed to HR 848 as they are, for most of the same reasons. So the truth is surely more complicated than Cathy Hughes and her posse would have us believe.

HR 848, the so-called Performance Rights Act, which Hughes says may be the death knell of black radio is sponsored by Detroit congressman John Conyers. It has dozens of high-profile celebrity boosters. The legislation will supposedly compensate performing artists – authors, composers and copyright holders are already taken care of by other intellectual property laws – when their work is played on the radio. Putting aside for the moment the economics of radio stations, it doesn’t sound like an inherently bad idea. Artistry is work, and work ought to be paid, right?

Will Revenue From the Performance Rights Act Actually Reach Performers?

The answers here are: not much and not likely. Given the historic business practices of the industry, and the provisions of HR 848, it’s safe to say artists won’t see much of this money. It will be extracted from radio stations,and collected and disbursed by Sound Exchange or other representatives of the same suits who have made an industry out of stealing from artists since the dawn of time, or at least since recording business managed to make the recorded product it distributed and controlled, instead of the artists’ live performances which it did not control, the music industry’s main revenue stream. HR 848 also guarantees industry execs the right to rake an unspecified portion off the top for handling charges.

Section 6(1)(1)(a) of the law says that entitlement of the artist to these payments is “…in accordance with the terms of the artist’s contract,” rather than in addition to or outside of and not subject to the contract. In plain English that means a cleverly written or dishonestly administered contract can easily divert these new “performance royalties” to pockets other than those of the performers.

As Mark Anthony Neal put it:

“Record companies are simply disingenuous when they suggest that artists will benefit from the passing of HR 848, when their own business practices guarantee the average artist less than 10-percent of profits generated from the sale of their recordings and the companies will themselves take part of the proceeds generated from the collection of a “performance tax.” If the RIAA and Record companies were really so concerned with the plight of artist, they would create less exploitive relationships with artists. ”

The representatives of RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, clearly wrote this law for their own benefit, not that of artists. It’s no secret that CD sales, and recording industry profits have been on the downtourn for years. The RIAA blames this on digital technologies and downloading, and it has used its lobbying muscle in Congress to pass one law after another against what it calls digital “piracy.”.

According to Lawrence Lessig, RIAA has aided the Department of Justice in prosecuting 25,000 people over the last few years for downloading songs over the internet without paying license fees. As far as anybody knows not a penny recovered has gone to artists. Two years ago RIAA imposed a similar fee structure on internet radio, making it prohibitively expensive for many of those stations to incorporate any sort of music in their programming. The defenders of internet radio saw the handwriting on the wall; they predicted that broadcast radio would be next. Tom Joyner, Cathy Hughes and the rest did nothing, and now the wolf is at their door.

How HR 848 Will Work in the Real World: More Payola and the Same Old Songs

In the real world, there are two economies. There’s a real economy where goods and services are produced, and where wealth is created by labor of one kind or another. There is also a fake economy, a parasite on the real one comprised mostly of the FIRE sector, (finance, insurance and real estate) along with the intellectual property racket. This fake economy lives on rents, interest payments, user fees and government subsidies. Its agents are always on the lookout for places in the real economy where they can plant toll booths to extract revenue without the bother of providing any service or adding any value.

The so-called Performance Rights bill is a toll booth the recording industry wants to place in the middle of radio broadcasting. It creates a new class of “intellectual property” supposedly for the benefit of performing artists, but subject to the artist’s contract, administered, and easily tapped by the record labels and their reps. The possibilities for abuse by labels and the recording industry are mind boggling, and include the outright legalization of longstanding industry practices of payola and reverse payola. While standard fees will be set, rates are open to bargaining between broadcasters and labels who supposedly represent artists. Labels will be able to offer one station or chain of them a lower rate on the songs of preferred artists if they take less preferred ones as part of the package. Labels already pay for remotes, contest premiums, and the personal appearances of station personalities with their artists. The “performance rights” revenue stream will be just one more channel they can adjust upward or downward in their bargaining with broadcasters.

They can offer a station or chain a lower rate for reducing the airplay of a competitor’s music or scrubbing it from the playlists altogether. Labels can demand a higher compensation rate than that offered to other artists, and where they have the bargaining power, some stations can demand lower rates than other stations. The largest chains, like Clear Channel, will be in a better bargaining position than smaller ones like Radio One. Just as Cathy Hughes and the “save black radio” crowd are saying, smaller chains, smaller stations, and the relative few minority station owners will be disproportionately endangered. Black radio as we know it truly is in mortal danger.

Will HR 848 Put More Money in the Pockets of Up and Coming Artists?

No way. Beyond the fact that the suits will intercept most of the funds before artists ever see them, you have to get radio airplay to get paid. Most artists can’t get played on the radio now, and HR 848 doesn’t change that. Labels will have little incentive to press lesser known and new artists onto the stations, since they’ll make more money on the higher fees established artists will command.

If Cathy Hughes and black broadcasters wanted to call the bluff of RIAA and the pro “performance rights” people on showcasing new artists, they could garner unprecedented public support and look like real heroes in this. All it would take, one industry insider told BAR, would be for them to throw away their payola-influenced playlists for a couple days each week and play nothing but new, unknown, up-and-coming artists. “That’s what they’d do if they really wanted to be the good guys in this, if they had the imagination and the nerve,” we were told. But don’t look for that to happen.

Where Will the Recording Industry Plant its Next Revenue- Extracting Toll Booth?

Two years ago it was internet radio. This season broadcast radio is in the crosshairs. Once the “performance rights” toll booth is planted in broadcast radio, it won’t be long before the RIAA demands payments from nightclub disk jockeys, who unlike radio broadcasters, do not have their own paid lobbyists, or from the guy down the street you hired to spin records at a birthday party last week. Think about it. What if innovators like DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambatta were forced to pay a “performance rights” fee?

Ultimately, this is where the creation and expansion of new and old “intellectual property” rights leads us: to the place where artistic innovation and simple truth telling are squashed by the need to maximize the profit of somebody who doesn’t do the creating, the labor and the performing in the first place.

Runaway “intellectual property” rights are the problem, not the solution

Eyes On The Prize, the award winning 14-hour documentary first aired on PBS in 1987 and 1990 is a great example of how intellectual property rights are used to strangle free expression in the public interest. When the work was produced in the 1990s, its authors could only raise the money to get time-limited rights to the archival news footage and music used in this thirty-year chronicle of the Freedom Movement and its aftermath. When the rights to the music and news footage ran out in the 1990s, the program could no longer be broadcast anywhere in the U.S. Copies were pulled from shelves no DVDs of it were produced. By 2005 the asking price for copies of Eyes On The Prize was $1,500 on ebay, and the only publicly viewable copies were on the shelves of public libraries. This invaluable history was lost to a new generation. Why?

Because major news organizations like CBS and NBC claimed they had to get a cut every time it was broadcast since pieces of their news footage was in it. The authors and composers of songs played in the documentary insisted their “rights” were violated if the show was broadcast and they were not reimbursed. There’s a scene in which Dr. martin Luther King’s aides surprise him with a birthday cake and sing a verse of “Happy Birthday.” The multinational firm which owned the rights to the song demanded $20,000 to keep the scene intact. It’s all a perfectly legal part of the intellectual property racket.

Another example of the absurdly parasitic nature of the intellectual property regime, is the classic 1942 movie Casablanca. Since it was made almost seventy years ago, every human being involved in writing, producing, performing, and editing it, those who catered the food, mixed the sound, worked the cameras, sets, costumes and makeup and the rest have all passed away, most of them decades ago. We don’t have to worry about the movie’s revenues encouraging these people to keep up their creative work because they are long dead.

Still, Casablanca remains the private intellectual property of its vampire owners, who had nothing to do with creating it. You cannot broadcast, perform, duplicate or sell a DVD of it without paying them. This is precisely what the Performance Rights Bill will do for radio; it will set up another deathless toll booth to extract payments, mostly for works decades old, on behalf of investors who had nothing to do with creating or performing it, but supposedly in the name of the performing artists themselves.

Two wrongs are just twice as wrong: oppose HR 848

HR 848 is bad news, no doubt about it, and should be defeated. Cathy Hughes and her posse dare not tell us exactly why, because the more we understand about the recording and radio industries the guiltier she and her colleagues look for helping construct and profit from this system which has now turned upon them. Black commercial radio is very much corporate radio and every bit as much the enemy as the corrupt recording industry. Commercial black radio does not deliver news or public service or local content. It doesn’t showcase new talent. Black radio as we know it has never defended nonprofit community radio stations, or low power FM radio. Like the black business class itself, black radio has become incapable of defending itself by painting an accurate picture and simply telling the truth – black radio refused to step up when the performance rights toll booth was imposed on internet radio, by which time any fool could see they were the next target.

Where Do We Go From Here?

We have to look beyond old John Conyers, his celebrity spokespeople and the lobbyists who pull their strings. We have to ignore the hypocritical squeals of Cathy Hughes and corporate black radio. The broadcast radio and intellectual property regimes are both in need of deep and thorough reform.

Corporate actors need to be held responsible directly by the people. Black audiences need to demand that the corporations who aim their broadcasts at black communities:

Support HR 1147, the Community Low Power Radio Act

This law enables nonprofit community broadcasters to operate low power radio stations with three to six mile footprints in thousands of urban, suburban and rural communities. Low power nonprofit broadcasters will provide news and public service and access to audiences for local artists.

Support community radio and nonprofit broadcasting

Hundreds of community radio stations already exist to provide cultural and news programming that corporate outlets refuse to. They too will be adversely affected by the performance rights toll booth.

Remove the “performance rights” toll booth from internet radio, and prevent its extension to deejays and others

The proliferation of “intellectual property” toll booth is virtually strangling the new medium of communication in its cradle, and the reach of the intellectual property rackets threaten film, video, the internet and the emergence of new art, artists and means of expression. Ways must be found to compensate artists, not investors.

Allow CDs and DVD mixtapes and videos to be sent through the mail at no cost

For most of the 19th century, newspaper postage was free. When Frederick Douglass and others started anti-slavery newspapers they paid no postage, and newspapers were most of the post office’s traffic. Technological advances have placed audio and video production within the reach of many, but corporate lobbyists have rigged the postal code to prevent the sharing of CDs and DVDs with mass audiences.

Demand that the FCC conduct real inquiries into payola

This is the dead dog in the room that neither the “save black radio” crowd nor the recording industry will talk about. But it’s real, and it’s the main barrier to new and diverse artists being heard on the airwaves.

Shorten the broadcast license term to three years

Under Ronald Reagan broadcast licenses were extended to eight years, making broadcasters much less responsible to the public and thwarting the public accountability at renewal times. Acting FCC Commissioner Michael Kopps has already suggested this reform, though he says it will be up to his successor appointed by the Obama administration to carry it out. That means it’s up to us to demand it.

Demand that black radio employ journalists and a newsgathering operation or lose the good will of black communities.

This is a demand communities can make directly upon the corporate license holders. A generation ago black radio did exactly that, and provided news and public service to its audience, something we will not see again without a demand.

Use the transition to digital radio as the occasion to redistribute broadcast licenses.

Like the transition to digital TV, the switch to digital radio broadcasting means that many more frequencies will be available. But instead of the time for voices to be heard, a corrupt deal gave all the new digital TV channels to existing holders of broadcast TV licenses. That must not happen with digital radio.

BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon can be contacted at Bruce.Dixon(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

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