Below is an article from a friend. It is very ineteresting. Enjoy it.

http://www.globeandmail.com

The Globe and Mail

February 19, 2001

Globe Review

Not Black Like Me

Black Entertainment Television came to Canada vowing to
showcase black culture. But disillusioned viewers say what
it delivered was mainly nasty stereotypes and explicit
videos. Where, they wonder, is the Canadian content?

By Vernon Clement Jones, Special to The Globe and Mail

With a rallying cry of "by blacks and for blacks," Black
Entertainment Television burst onto the arguably colourless
Canadian TV screen. Heck, there is no argument -- in 1997,
it was colourless. But the U.S. specialty channel promised
to change all that. So we 600,000 black Canucks sat back and
watched. Well actually, if truth be told, we sat back and
squirmed.

"When BET came to Toronto, we were all excited," says Joyce
Bannister, a founding member of Toronto's Black Business and
Professional Association and a member of the Order of
Canada. "But it got so vulgar and was putting down black
people, especially women, that I stopped watching. Let's
face it.

These negative images lend themselves to some pretty bad
stereotyping, and I'm not like that."

Bannister's not alone. Many of the country's blacks ask why
a channel for which they lobbied the Canadian Radio-
television and Telecommunications Commission -- and which is
now seen in 2.4 million Canadian homes -- has brought little
but wildly explicit music videos, dumbed-down programming
and the revival of nasty stereotypes?

"BET came here invoking black solidarity to get the support
of local blacks," says Clifton Joseph, a correspondent with
the CBC's media watchdog program, Undercurrents. "When it
had our backing, it abandoned us and then bombarded us with
jive-talk images."

The two-time Gemini Award-winner points to the absence of
Canadian content in BET. It is content, he says, that
Canadians were promised, but BET never delivered.

The Washington-based broadcaster was launched 21 years ago
in the United States, when its founder, Robert Johnson, then
a lobbyist on Capitol Hill, vowed to fill the black void
left by the big American networks. The epitome of black
entrepreneurialism, he planned to show black America in
Technicolor splendor instead of the stereotypical black and
white images his country was trading in.

Cleared by the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission to broadcast in Canada in 1997
because there were no black Canadian stations, BET
represented its programming as a showcase of black culture
-- including a mix of drama, social studies, music and
politics. Yet today, no less than 65 per cent of the package
is music-video programming. And it's these videos that
attract the lion's share of criticism. Here's a sampling.

Cita's World is one of the 16 video countdown shows that eat
up BET time slots. Cita's the computer-generated image of a
fast-talking, tell-the-truth-so-long-as-it's-raunchy kind of
"sistah" from deep-up in the American 'hood. "Attitude"
doesn't even come close.

In one video currently on the playlist, Danger by Mystikal,
a black girl crawls across a bar counter, her large breasts
barely contained by a bikini top. She tongues the face of
the fully clothed rapper. Another shot has Mystikal lying in
a bed as he's groped by a bevy of bikini-clad beauties.
Never was the Beach Boys lyric "two girls for every boy" so
passe. Try 20, Brian.

In another video, Pump Hard, hip-hop artist 8 Ball sits on
the hood of his Bentley -- this season's luxmobile of choice
-- as a couple of bikini babes grind their crotches into his
appreciative face.

These two artists are by no means alone. Almost all the
videos on BET adhere to this formula of T and A and more T
and A. The hosts of BET shows seem similarly cast from a
single mould. It was one that I thought had been broken when
America tired of Amos and Andy's muggings for the camera and
Rochester's "Yessums" in response to Jack Benny's commands.

But I find my self longing for TV as innocuous as that
fifties fare when I watch one BET host called Hits spend an
hour asking white folks in D.C. to eat his "booger." Neither
Amos nor Andy would've gone there.

Few topics of discussion are as sensitive as the issue of
black media representation. I asked several media-savvy
Torontonians -- blacks, whites and Asians -- to join me for
a weekend of watching this controversial channel and invited
them to be part of a panel that would offer some analysis.

At 27, one of the panelists, a black woman, sits smack dab
in the middle of BET's target audience (19 to 34 years of
age). And she's not the slightest bit bashful about
discussing the American broadcaster's impact on her
community. "BET is completely a mismatch for the black
Canadian market," says Vivian Barclay, a deejay on Toronto's
alternative radio station, CKLN.

"We are not those people depicted on the videos or on the
actual programs. In Canada, we don't have the statistics of
one in four men in jail and we don't need our kids fed on a
steady diet of words like 'bitches,' and 'hoes.'"

It takes a little more coaxing to elicit the opinions of
another panelist, this one white. "I'm staggered by the
depiction of women and men and the relationship between them
in these videos," says Jagg Griffith, a professor of
journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University. "The whole
programming thrust of the station, as I saw it, is defined
by stereotypes of the most egregious kind.

These images in no way resemble the black women in my
classes or any black women I know."

Like Griffith, the next panelist is something of an outsider
when it comes to black entertainment -- he's South Asian.
But reporter Errol Narazeth is not afraid to speak his mind
on the music he covers for the Toronto Sun -- R&B, hip-hop
and soul.

"Racists must be having a field day with BET," offers
Nazareth. "There are people who don't come into contact with
different communities and if the media is shaping their
opinions they're getting a pretty twisted view of black
life. Perhaps when they see enough images like that and see
kids trying to live up to those images they put two and two
together and get four. As a minority living in a racist
society, image is everything."

BET exerts enormous influence on the Canadian hip-hop scene,
says Nazareth, who promotes the Canadian artists in this
fringe industry gone mainstream.

Still, Canadian rappers are more likely to drive VW Bugs
than the Bentleys, Benzes and Broncos of their American
counterparts. And except for coverage of Toronto's Caribana
parade, Canadian performers rarely make it to BET's
playlist.

The CRTC doesn't demand Canadian content from BET, and it
shows. In our three days tuned into the broadcaster, not one
Canadian artist appeared. That's not surprising because BET
is virtually the same in Canada as it is in the U.S. "The
programming here is on a direct feed from D.C.," says Yvette
Thomas, the channel's only Canadian representative.

Roslyn Doaks, BET's vice-president of special markets,
explains: "The CRTC doesn't require BET to have any Canadian
programming. None. And we have never promised anything to
anyone. But, of our own initiative, we do showcase Canadian
talent like what's her name? Deborah Cox."

As for any criticism of her network's music programming,
Doaks says BET doesn't make the videos: It just plays them.
Back in front of the tube, I watch the production credits on
a basketball game roll to a close.

This BET sportscast was an all-black affair -- 97 per cent
of BET's 530 employees are people of colour. And for every
B-ball player on the court, there were at least three
qualified BET techies -- cameramen, writers, directors and
producers.

Bannister, one of the panelists, questions whether BET's
programming is preparing its young viewers to fill these
media-type jobs or just basketball hoops and Big Mac orders.

"The truth is that very few black kids are going to make it
in professional sports or the music business," says
Bannister. "They need to see some positive programs to
empower themselves."

But we may be asking too much of BET, says another black
panelist, former CBC journalist Hamlin Grange. After all, he
says, many new channels start out green, or in BET's case,
raw.

"When BET first hit the airwaves in Canada, I was singularly
unimpressed. You might as well have called it 'Booty
Television,' " says Grange, now the head of ProMedia
Productions. "But a lot of us are forgetting how right here
in Toronto CITY-TV launched itself with blue movies and the
soft porn series Casanova. There's a reason for that: When
you start up you need to get people to watch, but,
hopefully, you move beyond that. From what I've seen, BET is
starting to do that."

On the last day of our weekend BET watch, infomercials and
Southern evangelists duke it out for the biggest cut of the
Sunday sked. But the white Bible thumpers, who seem to
preach against every sin in the good book but racism, will
lose this battle: Infomercials are essential revenue for
many cable companies. There is some serious, meaty content
on the channel. Tonight with Tavis Smiley and BET News with
Ed Gordon are late-night shows covering the black America
that rarely makes it onto the newscasts of the big networks,
unless it's rioting in Bensonhurst, Bedford-Stuyvesant or
the South Bronx.

However, Marwon Lucas, a 21-year-old student at Centennial
College in Toronto, complains that while Smiley and Gordon
cover stories of interest to blacks in the States -- and do
it well -- they fail to cast their nets north of the border,
to their 600,000 black Canadian cousins.

Whether BET ever expands its content to reflect the tastes
of black Canadians now rests in the hands of one of
America's biggest corporations.

In a $3-billion (U.S.) deal, Robert Johnson recently sold
BET's holdings -- including three cable channels, two radio
stations, a publishing house and a film company -- to the
media giant Viacom, parent company of CBS, MTV and other big
brand names.

If Lucas had his way, Viacom's first step would be to move
the two late-night shows with Gordon and Smiley to
primetime, where they belong.

"All I hope is that Viacom does make some difference --
stops recycling the same videos and maybe brings in some
coherent hosts," he says.

After my BET blitz, I'm in an exercise class trying to work
off three days of junk food. And I can't help wondering why,
if black Canadians are so offended by BET, only "one or two"
have complained to the CRTC.

The fitness instructor distracts me from my train of thought
by turning up the volume on a song by Britney Spears, soon
to be followed by a medley of Madonna and then some techno
stuff. Looking around at the happy white faces, I realize my
question has just been answered. All of BET's stereotyped
images notwithstanding, where else but BET are black
Canadians going to get some black music?

Now that's what you call being caught between the devil and
the deep white sea.

Copyright (c) 2001 Globe Interactive, a division of Bell
Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.



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