The Black News Channel, the first 24-hour news channel specifically targeted at an African-American audience, will launch on February 10 to coincide with Black History Month.
Founded by former Rep. JC Watts, an Oklahoma Republican, the network will premiere in 33 million homes primarily in large African-American markets such as New York City, Los Angeles and Atlanta.
Based in Tallahassee, Florida, BNC says it will produce television programming and digital content written and produced “by blacks, for blacks.”
BNC’s programming will feature all-black on-air talent like former libertarian radio host Larry Elder and will draw from historically black colleges and universities for much of its on-air experience, according to Watts. However, the network will not be entirely managed or owned by blacks: CEO Bob Brilliant and COO Jim Zerwekh are both white.
Watts said the network will provide reliable and accurate nonpartisan coverage of issues that are often ignored by mainstream media, such as mass incarceration, but said it would also cover other areas from a black perspective, such as health and wellness. .
Watts told NBC that planning for the network began more than 10 years ago. He said that at the time he knew there was demand in the market for a black news channel and that his company’s research shows that demand still exists.
A 2018 Nielsen report found that MSNBC, the 24-hour news channel, was the most popular primetime cable channel among African-Americans. And according to a 2012 Niselsen study, 91 percent of African-Americans believe black-owned media is most relevant to them. With the BNC, Watts saw an opportunity to meet the growing demand for cable news among the African-American community.
“Today, the information is so targeted to groups,” Watts said. “Every demographic has a place they can go to for information on news, culture, wellness, etc. Except the African American community.”
The channel will partner with the National Association of Newspaper Publishers, a trade association made up of more than 200 African-American-owned community newspapers across the country. The association’s president, Benjamin Chavis, told NBC that the association would act as a system of national bureaus, with much of BNC’s news coverage based on reporting done by NNPA members at the local level.
According to Chavis, the association would benefit from BNC’s distribution network and digital advertising revenue. He added that he believes in BNC’s mission and is excited that the Association of Newspaper Publishers is a part of it.
“One of the things I’ve witnessed in my 30-plus years in the black press is that there’s been a tendency for black news to be marginalized and under-distributed,” Chavis said. “For me, there is an opportunity for the black press to fill that void.”
For Chavis, that doesn’t just mean having the ability to cover topics like environmental racism and police brutality from a black perspective, it also means expanding coverage of positive news that is largely ignored by the mainstream media.
“The mainstream media covers the pathology of black America. They don’t cover the sociology of it,” Chavis said. “Success stories are important to our community, to see African Americans strive and achieve excellence.”
When it debuts this month, the BNC will enter the canon of the black press, an institution with a pivotal place in the long history of African-American civil rights struggles. Black-owned newspapers helped fuel the Great Migration in the mid-1910s and gave black news consumers a more sympathetic voice for stories about Jim Crow-era racist oppression and violence, such as murder by Emmett Till.
The reach of the once profitable and highly influential black press has diminished significantly in recent decades. According to a report on the State of Black Media released last year by the Obsidian Collection, an organization that archives and preserves Black-owned newspapers, Black newspapers have seen their profitability drop dramatically since the advent of digital news and social media. .
“The fact that we had a vibrant black press separate from the mainstream press was essential to our own success,” Angela Ford, founder of the Obsidian Collection, told NBC. “Losing that, or having it substantially vanished, has allowed…the narrative of the Black experience, the narrative of African American history itself, to be co-opted, misrepresented and watered down by the corporate media.”
The launch of the BNC comes at a time when the black press is at a crossroads. The Chicago Defender, the 115-year-old newspaper that reached millions and once featured legendary black writers like Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, ceased all printing operations last summer. And Ebony magazine, founded in 1972, closed the same month as Defender, after struggling to pay its writers amid a difficult bankruptcy.
For Chavis, whose NNPA represents the Defender along with other legacy newspapers like The Omaha Star, the loss of these black outlets is bittersweet: both a tragedy and an opportunity to adapt to new business models, one that he believes BNC will capitalize on.
Tiffany Walden was one of the Ebony writers who eventually got paid, and she was named in a lawsuit filed against the now-defunct magazine. She runs her own digital media outlet called The Triibe, which she co-founded with video journalist Morgan Johnson in 2017. The website covers the African-American community in Chicago, and its stated goal is to “reshape the narrative of black Chicago.” by returning control of that narrative to Black storytellers and content creators.
Walden isn’t so sure that BNC can, or should, fill the void being left behind by the faltering black news outlets. He agreed that television news is clearly an area where black-owned media has a lot of room to grow: His grandmother, he said, watches CNN all day. But Walden also expressed concern about Watts’ record as a congressman from a party he believes is antithetical to African-American progress. And the fact that the CEO and COO are conservative white men, he added, does not bode well for BNC’s ability to cover the issues that matter to the black community.
“It matters who owns these posts. The people, the communities, the content creators, the storytellers, we should own our media companies,” he said. “It would have been a breath of fresh air to have something like this. But I can’t get past the fact that it’s run by two Republican white men.”
Brilliant and Zerwekh are registered Republicans, according to public voter registration data.
And the biggest investor in BNC is a Republican, Shad Khan, the only Muslim owner in the NFL (the Jacksonville Jaguars).
Ford echoed Walden’s skepticism. She said that she was excited by the prospect of a 24-hour black news channel, but that she doubted the network’s ability to escape corporate influence and speak authentically to the African-American community.
“I will be looking forward to see if this is Black people speaking authentically to each other, or another corporate strategy to capitalize on a category of people,” he said.
Chavis, the president of the NNPA, has a long history of fighting for civil rights for African Americans. In his youth he was an aide to Martin Luther King Jr. and rose to fame as a member of the Wilmington Ten, who were wrongfully convicted of arson and conspiracy in 1971 in North Carolina (the 10 spent nearly a decade in prison before being released). be released). and forgiven). He said he sees the NNPA’s partnership with the Watts BNC as an important example of bipartisan cooperation toward a common goal.
“Even though I am a Democrat and he is a Republican, I felt it was time for blacks in the media to work together without getting involved or entrenched in partisan divide,” Chavis said.
Ford maintains that his confidence in BNC as an authentic and revolutionary black media outlet is limited. But if she’s proven wrong, she’s in for a pleasant surprise.
“I am optimistic about the future of black journalism and I think there is a demand for a black television network that targets today’s African-American audience,” Ford said. “I don’t know if that’s what this is.”
