The author of a new study reporting a US$53 million surge in high-tech purchases by African American families in 1996 says that the rush of blacks into the online world is being driven partly by a hunger to find replacements for news and programming that have vanished during a decade of buyouts of minority broadcast outlets by huge conglomerates like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
Ken Smikle, president of Target Market News and author of the report, "The Buying Power of Black America," found that African American families are spending more than twice as much per household for online services as their white counterparts. That contributed to a total of $751 million in high-tech purchases by blacks last year - nearly a fivefold increase since 1993.
"Over the last 10 years, black public-affairs programming has virtually disappeared" from the airwaves, Smikle said in an interview.
Although he describes the flight of blacks from broadcast media to the Net as "a revolution ... that no one is seeing," Smikle was joined today in sounding an alarm about decreasing minority ownership of broadcast channels by Larry Irving, assistant secretary of Commerce and head of the department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Irving told a convention of the National Association of Black-Owned Broadcasters in Washington that "minority ownership is melting away.... We need a renewed public examination and debate about the merits of minority ownership and diversity of voice in the media."
In its annual Minority Commercial Ownership Report, the agency noted "dismal numbers" in the decline of minority-owned stations, clocking a loss of nearly 10 percent (28 stations out of 322) in the number of black-owned radio and TV stations in the past year. The report noted that, although "the decline in black ownership can be ascribed in part to the sale of US Radio, the largest black-owned broadcast company in the US, to Clear Channel Communications ... NTIA also believes that the underrepresentation of minority owners bears a direct relationship to a lack of access to investment capital, and the lack of legislation and policy initiatives that promote minority ownership."
Irving encouraged black broadcasters to "explore opportunities presented by new technologies" - specifically the Internet - as a means of getting minority voices heard in the "growing number of ways for people to get news, entertainment, and information."
"The ability to do audio and video streaming on the Net has opened up new opportunities for broadcasters," Irving said. "We must not continue to work merely with yesterday's tools, but seize the opportunities afforded by new technologies and their applications."
Joseph Mouzon, vice president of sales and marketing for NetNoir, welcomed the news of the Target Market report, declaring that "the Internet is the Robin Hood of media. It's robbing from the rich the lock-hold they have on distribution of information and programming, and putting the means for that distribution in the hands of the poor."
Opting out of the Murdoch game
Disillusionment with TV and radio programming that is "of questionable quality for African American adults, to put it very kindly," is driving blacks onto the Net to find accurate representations of their lives and restore a lost sense of connection with local, national, and international black communities, Smikle said.
"Black AM talk radio stations have been an important way for people to stay in touch with local news of their communities, and with this latest wave of consolidation, they're disappearing," he said. "If I want to find out about the truth and reconciliation trials in South Africa, local and national news stations aren't going to touch it.... So where do you go? Chat rooms and black Web sites. On the Internet, I'm four clicks away."
Smikle also observed that while expenditures on hardware and online services increased this year, African American spending on software fell from $108 million to $88 million. Smikle believes that this is due to the trend of more and more manufacturers bundling online software with hardware packages, and the fact that "there's not a lot of Afrocentric software out there. The real items of black interest are on the Net, and in places like the Black Voices forum on AOL. If you come up with software that meets the needs [of African Americans], you'll be virtually alone in doing so."
Smikle predicts that "the fundamental exchange of information between manufacturers and black consumers is going to happen online."
NetNoir's Mouzon believes that black owners of broadcast outlets shouldn't be vilified for selling out to mega-moguls like Murdoch. "It's not like these stations are being stolen. Murdoch is going to the owners and saying, 'I'll give you 10 times your revenue.' We're all out here to make money. You can't stop capitalism for some social reason."
Mouzon notes, however, that the Net can be a valuable organizational tool for blacks who are angry about underrepresentation.
"Last year, Murdoch's Fox TV network canceled the two highest-rated black shows, New York Undercover and Living Single," Mouzon explains. "It was only because of a huge outcry from the black community that those shows were restored. Some of that outcry was driven by the Internet gathering steam."
"When bandwidth increases," adds Mouzon, "you're going to have the producers of those shows going to the Net, delivering them right to the people who want to see them. They won't have to play the Murdoch game."
Mouzon hopes that advertisers heed the implications of the Target Market study. "I need Madison Avenue to recognize that ... it's less expensive for Honda to target an affluent African American on the Internet than it is on TV or radio."
Driven off welfare and onto the Net
Though an Associated Press report on Tuesday about "The Buying Power of Black America" enthused that the study disputes "concerns that black households are being left behind in a computer-oriented world ... [and] suggests they are quickly driving onto the information superhighway," Smikle is careful to note that "there is a real need to be concerned about low-income households and their ability to have access" to the technology.
A report released by the Educational Testing Service in May painted a grim picture of low-income black students being left in the virtual dust by the computer revolution in schools. The Department of Education recommends that the ratio of students to computers in schools be 5 to 1, but in schools where minority enrollment is more than 90 percent, that ratio is a dismal 17 to 1 - and 30 to 1 for hi-tech rigs with enhanced graphics and video capabilities. At the poorest schools, 35 students fight for the use of a single computer. Richard Coley, a researcher for the ETS, told The Washington Post, "The kids with the most needs are getting the least access."
Organizations like Herbie Hancock's Rhythm of Life, and Plugged In, in predominantly black East Palo Alto, California, are on the front lines of the battle to give poor kids a ramp up. Offering access to the Net, computing classes for adults, after-school programs, and even such basic resources as the use of copy machines, Plugged In, supported in part by donations from Silicon Valley giants like Intel and Hewlett-Packard, serves the needs of those who can't afford the hardware, much less monthly fees for online services.
Instructor Rebecca Matthews says that low-income families from as far away as San Francisco (30 miles north) call the organization, pleading for the loan of a computer for their children's use. For those who are being "forced off the welfare rolls by welfare reform," Matthews says, "having access to a computer is access to a whole new world. They need these skills to get jobs."
Matthews points out that the embrace of Internet technology by the main traditional vehicle of information exchange in the African American community - the church - is adding to the push for blacks to get online. "Since slavery, churches have always been the medium for getting social and economic news around. In the last year, several churches have asked us to build Web sites for them.... When the churches open their doors to the Net, people get computers in their homes."
Noting that "middle-class African American families are making the same sacrifices [to buy computers] that they made to get hundred-dollar sneakers and Nintendo 64s," Smikle foresees a huge potential for companies that would market last year's high-tech models to middle- and lower-income black families.
"Car dealers figured that out awhile ago, after they started offering five- or six-year leases on cars to clear the lots. Who do you think was buying those cars when they got turned back in?" Smikle says. "If you've got a 486, that's all you need. The first company that figures this out is going to make a killing."
"Black people have never been scared of technology. We're early adopters," Mouzon observes. "Whether you're talking about pagers or cellular phones or the Net, we gravitate toward anything that helps us communicate effectively because we like to talk."
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