Filling a Niche: How Bob Johnson Cashed in on the Promise of Cable

Crisis, The, May/Jun 2004 by Cobb, William Jelani

books

Filling a Niche: How Bob Johnson Cashed in on the Promise of Cable

The Billion Dollar BET: Robert Johnson and the Inside Story of Black Entertainment Television

By Brett Pulley (Wiley, $24.95)

In America, money talks so that the people who possess it don't have to. More often than not, wealth acts as its own rationale, the standing reply to any criticism regarding how it was attained. In the case of Bob Johnson, billionaire media baron, sports franchise owner and subject of Brett Pulley's informative new biography, wealth is the raison d' etre for his most successful enterprise: Black Entertainment Television.

By any standard, Johnson is an impressive individual; his life is an Algeresque tale of rising from poverty in Hickory, Miss., to the pinnacle of business success. He has etched his name into history as the first African American billionaire, helped to launch dozens of entertainment careers and provided employment for hundreds of people, almost all of them Black. Yet one comes away from The Billion Dollar BET with the impression that Johnson gained the world only to lose his soul. Pulley, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who covers the media and entertainment industries, presents here both the savvy, incisive business mind that created a lucrative enterprise and the cool-hearted, dispassionate character who left numerous crumbled careers in his wake doing so.

In the author's estimation, Johnson is equal parts Horatio Alger and Citizen Kane. "Unlike so many black entrepreneurs before him," Pulley informs us early on, "Johnson did not worry about his company being perceived as one that consciously uplifted the race." The primary purpose of Black Entertainment Television (BET) was to make money, a mission that was simultaneously the company's greatest strength and the source of its most vocal criticism.

The seed that was to germinate into BET began during Johnson's tenure as a staffer for Walter Fauntroy, then the District of Columbia's delegate to Congress. The two discussed the coming deregulation of cable television laws and the possibility of creating a venue through which Fauntroy could directly address his constituents. In short order, Johnson became a lobbyist for the cable industry and, recognizing that the Black and "urban" populations were being overlooked by the nascent industry, quit his job to create his own network.

Armed with a $15,000 bank loan and a business plan he'd adapted from a Mend who was trying to build a network directed at elderly viewers, Johnson was able to secure additional investment money from John Malone of Telecommunications Inc., which at the time was becoming the country's largest cable operator. BET was incorporated for $42 in September 1979 and aired its first program four months later.

To his credit, Johnson appeared, from the outset, to have no ceiling to his ambition and the limitless will to achieve his aspirations. After launching his flagship cable station, he branched out to restaurants (BET SoundStage), a website (BET.com) and magazines (including YSB and Emerge, publications to which this reviewer occasionally contributed).

He also seemed to have a racism-proof exterior, easily deflecting commerits or actions - such as a White woman mistaking him for her chauffeur - that might have enraged or discouraged other individuals. It is ironic, however, that on some level Johnson's personal capacity to navigate past racism toward success was linked to programming that was often criticized for presenting a narrow, stereotypical view of Black life. Featuring an almost perpetual display of gyrating derrieres and glamorized depictions of "ghetto life," the music videos that have long been the staple of BET's programming are at least partially responsible for the mass-marketing of racial stereotypes in hip-hop culture. When Dwight Ellis, the Black vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters, confronts Johnson at a reception, declaring him to be "the most dangerous man in black America," he is referring to just this issue.

There are other grounds for concern: When the production staff attempts to unionize, Johnson holds an impromptu meeting and threatens their employment; Johnson fought against violence ratings on cable programming and, unlike most other networks, accepted liquor adver-tisements. He paid emerging comedians only $150 to appear on his program Comic View and required that they sign away all rights to residuals.

After six Black executives refuse to voluntarily hand back their multimillion dollar stock options "for the good of the company," Johnson calls a meeting, vaguely reminiscent of a scene from The Godfather, at which he states to junior executives, "I'm no longer sure about the executive vice presidents who recently became millionaires, this may be your opportunity to step up." (He did not extend this treatment to the sole White vice president, who also refused to surrender his options.)

Johnson's orientation toward bottomline politics paid off - literally - when he sold his company to Viacom in 2000 for nearly $3 billion. Pulley's narration of Johnson's rise is engaging and informative, includes information about his personal life, and even a few nuggets about his divorce, but sometimes suffers from providing excess information with which most basically informed readers would already be familiar. He refers to BET's role in popularizing "an original musical style known as rap," for example, and describes Johnson's postgraduate education at Princeton, "an elite Ivy League University located in New Jersey." All told, Pulley has skillfully reported an important story of a man who repeatedly denied his requests for an interview for this book. Bob Johnson is keenly aware that a billion dollars speaks for itself.