Report: Black-Owned Media Companies Struggling

When Chicago-based Johnson Publishing announced a little more than two weeks ago that it had sold Ebony and Jet to a private equity firm in Texas, there was a sense of loss.

“It was a very heartbreaking day,” said Melody Spann-Cooper, the chairwoman of Midway Broadcasting Corporation, which owns a Chicago radio station, WVON, aimed at a black audience. “Ebony gave to African-Americans what Life didn’t.”

The NY Times reports Spann-Cooper’s reaction underscored a deeper concern: As racial issues have once again become a prominent topic in the national conversation, the influence of black-owned media companies on black culture is diminishing.

The picture is bleak in radio and television as well. In 2013, there were 166 black-owned radio stations and 68 black-owned radio companies, compared with 250 stations and 146 companies in 1995, according to the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters.

Only 12 commercial television stations in the country are black-owned, and they tend to serve very small markets. The future of Howard University Television, the country’s only black-owned public television station, is also in question, as the university’s participation in Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction has raised the possibility that it could end up selling its place on the airwaves or stop broadcasting entirely.

In the late 1970s, the FCC put into place a minority ownership policy that used credits and deferrals on capital gains taxes to help make minority businesses more competitive in the bidding process and promote the sale of existing stations to minorities.

The policy, while not without critics, was largely considered a success among advocates of minority ownership. But in 1995, after a Supreme Court ruling that established new standards for race-based government policies, the FCC began to disassemble the program. A year later, Congress ended the tax-deferral policy that had helped drive sales to minorities. It also did away with most restrictions on the number of radio stations a single company could own.

The resulting wave of consolidation in the broadcast industry has made it more difficult for black entrepreneurs to enter the industry, said Alfred C. Liggins III, the president and chief executive of Radio One, which while publicly traded is the country’s largest black-controlled multimedia company.

“That means that the likelihood that minority owners are going to own a TV station in New York or Los Angeles gets lower and lower,” said Mr. Liggins, whose mother founded the company with a single radio station in 1980.

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