Black Urban Media: The New Blackploitation

Information is freely available everywhere. So much that it is easy to verify and substantiate with a little effort. However, for most African Americans, the major news topics of the day are ignored by their most treasured sources of information – black owned urban media and radio.

Now if you want to find out about the release of an album, which is sleeping with who, the latest baby momma or what celebrities were fighting at the club, black urban media is your place. Most it seems have adopted the playbook of the National Enquirer. Now they will cover every itty bitty nuanced piece of information on Love and Hip Hop Atlanta, Real Housewives and Basketball wives, as well as stories on young black men being shot by white men, but only after it becomes the focus of the world. And let us not forget President Obama, it seems as if the only politics covered dally with the commander in Chief 95 percent of the time. But rarely anything else. You won’t find anything on the Eurozone Crisis, or the LIBOR scandal, or serious presentations of what is occurring in Libya, Syria, Somalia, or even the continuing crisis in Haiti or the senseless shootings in Chicago.

If such topics are presented, they are aggregated and tend to not have any prospective insight regarding the direct impact they have of African Americans, and worse, if they involve being critical of the Obama Administration, they are not presented at all.

Now maybe Blackploitation is not the correct term, afterall they made certin not to shot at anyone other than “the man”, “charlie,” or uncle tomes helping the man. Not to mention their message was always one of the come-up and collective empowerment. Maybe I am making a big issue out of nothing, maybe I’m not. What I can say is that we in this medium are intentionally dumbing down our community by offering garbage over the proper material for health intellectual development.

I take this from the message I learned reading “the Miseducation of the Negro some 30 years ago written by Carter G. Woodson. In the book he wrote: My query is, are we in urban black media building the back door without asking? I have often asked when did getting paid become for important than education in our community. If the answer the the previous is yes, than I have my answer.