The Nielsen Company also teamed up with the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a trade group representing 200 Black community newspapers, for the third consecutive year to produce the report, “Resilient, Receptive and Relevant: The African American Consumer 2013,” which noted that the buying power of Blacks likely will increase from its current level to $1.3 trillion by 2017.
And yet, even with these projections, Black media does not garner a fair share of corporate ad spending, but instead is circumvented for ad buys in general market media channels.
There are other indicators that point even more clearly to the problem.
Take a legal action launched recently by comedian-turned-media-mogul Bryon Allen. He recently filed a $20 billion lawsuit on behalf of his company, Entertainment Studios, against Comcast, Al Sharpton and Time Warner Cable.
Allen joined with the National Association of African-American Owned Media (NAAAOM) for the action, in which he accuses corporate America and these three companies [Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T], in specific, of paying off civil rights activist Al Sharpton as well as other organizations to sign-off on their diversity spending efforts. He has also filed a $10 million lawsuit against AT&T.
The entrepreneur is also suing former FCC commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker and pointed out that months after she voted to approve a merger, she took a high-paying job with Comcast. He wants the lawsuit to turn the spotlight on how this happened.
In a broadcast report on CNN, Allen accused the corporations of giving money to Sharpton to avoid having to support the broader Black press.
“This is a historic lawsuit,” said Allen. “It’s about economic inclusion . . . We don’t need charity. We don’t need people speaking for us. Just do business with us.”
According to Allen, there are numerous people who have gone to Comcast looking to start up a cable channel but they have essentially told these individuals to go away. The Los Angeles media entrepreneur said he has seven cable networks on Verizon. He also noted that the Black Family Channel was turned away from Comcast and told it would have to pay $10 million to be part of the cable station’s platform.
(Special to the NNPA from Our Weekly)