Black-Owned Media Wonders Where's The Political Revenue

Rep. Alcee Hastings leafed through Florida’s Westside Gazette and Miami Times recently and didn’t like what he saw – an absence of campaign ads from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the two African-American-owned newspapers.

“We have three (African-American) newspapers in my congressional district and I haven’t seen any evidence of the Clinton campaign . . . and certainly not the Trump campaign,” said Hastings, D-Fla..

The News-Tribune in Tacoma is reporting that in an election year in which presidential candidates and supporting political action committees could spend upward of $2 billion on political advertising, local African American-owned media outlets across the country say they’re getting few, if any, of the ad buys.

It’s a long-standing complaint from African-American-owned newspapers, radio and television stations and black elected officials that’s gotten louder each presidential election year – even during Barack Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

“We’ve been traditionally frustrated,” said James Winston, president of the National Association of Black Broadcasters. “It seems that every campaign season the parties view advertising in African-American-owned media as an afterthought usually a week or two before the election.”

Clarence McKee, an African-American Trump supporter who was a Federal Communications Commission attorney, thinks that Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party are leaving votes on the table by not courting African-Americans voters through local black-owned media.

He said the party is missing out on reaching some of Florida’s 237,568 African-American registered voters who aren’t affiliated with any party and may be persuaded to cast ballots for Trump and GOP congressional candidates.

It’s not just minority newspapers. With shrinking circulations, newspapers overall are struggling with falling ad revenue. A Pew Center report in January found that newspaper ad revenue fell 8 percent in 2015. And in 2016, newspapers find themselves as the fifth choice of political campaigns for ads.

Borrell Associates, an ad-tracking firm, said that of an estimated $11.7 billion that will be spent on campaigns this election cycle, $5.9 billion will go to broadcast television, $1.2 billion to cable, $1.2 billion to digital/online, $916.1 million to radio and $882 million to newspapers.