Media Consolidation and the Black Grass Roots
why the search for radio airtime is full of static
2007-08-08
By Eric Easter

Jesse Jackson won the majority of Southern states in his 1988 presidential bid, a major victory in the history of politics. Jackson had a good message, was a Southerner and was riding on strong momentum and a solid campaign organization that had his 1984 race for practice.

But that’s not why he won. He won because of Black radio.

Silently, Jackson amassed a small team of radio professionals whose job it was to capture snippets of speeches and pronouncements on tape and feed those clips as news “actualities” to the dozens of Black radio stations that dotted southern states like South Carolina, Louisiana, North Carolina and Mississippi.  To supplement the strategy, Jackson often started his days calling into drive-time DJs, monopolizing their valuable morning shows with political talk for minutes on end.

It was the radio version of a surgical strike that gave Jackson the ability to touch communities effectively without ever having to step foot in the state.  And often, all it took to make it happen was a call to the disc jockey, the news director, the program director or the Black owner of the radio station. Most importantly, it cost him nothing.

Could a smart 2008 presidential candidate who wants the Black vote make a play for the grassroots on radio the same way Jackson did?

The short answer is no. And there are several reasons why, including the nearly total elimination of news on commercial radio, the rise of syndicated programming and the major culprit, media consolidation.

A grassroots organizer trying to use radio as an earned media tool in South Carolina, for example, would have a very hard time of it. Of the few stations listed as “urban” in South Carolina, almost all are owned by Clear Channel or other conglomerates who program the channels almost entirely with syndicated content. That means no news director, program director or owner in the corner office who could even make the snap decision to, say, throw Obama on in the afternoon drive to answer calls from listeners.

With syndication, the power to reach the Black community via radio has been put in the hands of a few major syndicated radio personalities – Steve Harvey, Tom Joyner, Michael Baisden, Russ Parr, Donnie Simpson and a handful of others.  That would be fine, except that breaking into a few minutes of local radio is vastly different from trying to vie for time in the intricately planned programs of shows like Joyner’s.  Cutting into time that sponsors have paid for is nearly impossible.  It also eliminates the local angle.

That leaves Joe Madison’s show on XM and the handful of small stations still led by Black owners as the only vehicles left for broad, non-advertising based, spontaneous grassroots outreach - stations like WVON in Chicago and Percy Sutton’s WLIB. But while it’s a sorry situation for Black radio, at least in the way that it used to be vitally local, the net result of this state of affairs is not all bad. Maybe.

In order to reach Black voters effectively now, candidates are forced to spend actual money, either through advertising or, God forbid, actually re-routing the campaign bus to the Black neighborhoods they might ignore if they could reach them through other means.

But will that happen in the 2008 race? Doubtful. The major campaigns are already showing that they are only willing to do what they always have done, which is rely on popular Black “surrogates” to show up when the candidates cannot (or will not).  And their hired media buyers will do the usual as well, which is employ the “two week-strategy” – which means buying Black media only when it’s two weeks away from a primary as a “get out the vote” strategy.

In other words, the more things change the more they stay the same.

(Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company. He writes on media, tech and politics for ebonyjet.com. eeaster@ebony.com)