[...] According to a 2005 Nielsen study, African-Americans watch more television on average than the overall population. That appetite for television raises the question of why BET’s ratings are not higher.“BET does not have the ratings it should have with 12 percent of the audience being black,” said Leo Hindery, a partner in Intermedia Partners, which owns a majority stake in the Gospel Channel, a cable network. “It has never developed a soul of its own. I would do more sports than they are doing and I would stay with the youth audience.”
Ms. Lee disagrees. “To say we don’t have a soul of our own: I don’t know what that means,” she said, pointing out that the channel did carry black college football games and the ratings were not good.
“When you look at our shows that really work, we get a sizable percentage of the population. We are the No. 1 show in black households. We did a fund-raiser after Katrina and raised $113 million, so there was a strong connect to our programming.” [...]
| Go back for the rest of Geraldine Fabrikant's New York Times article "At BET, Fighting the Rerun"
Also useful: Tom Umstead's Multichannel News blog post "Black Family Channel: Big Loss," which notes that "[n]early one-quarter of all cable revenue comes from African-American homes, according to BET, and yet less than 1% of the industry’s video channels target that audience," and the Center for Creative Voices in Media's take.
posted in articles on May 28, 2007 11:22 AM | t (0)
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I stopped watching BET many years ago because the programming didn't speak to me. To much of the same rehashed bible thumping booty shaking stuff. I feel that there is more to the black community than that. I refuse to support something simply because black people put it out.
I don't know what is worse: BET (or, the Devil in Blackface)or a hundred other white-washed channels.
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