By Kay Mills

Darnell M. Hunt

In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders reported that the media had fundamentally "failed to analyze and report adequately on racial problems in the United States." It urged that coverage of the black community be integrated into all parts of newspapers and all aspects of televised presentations. "Television is such a visible medium that some constructive steps"—such as using black reporters and performers more frequently and in prime time—"are easy and obvious," the commission said.

Darnell M. Hunt's book, Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America (Oxford University Press), demonstrates, however, that while the steps to portray black America more accurately may have seemed obvious, they have been far from easy to accomplish. Absent any apparent will on the part of the major television networks and suppliers to make basic changes, programming is not likely to improve much in the future.

Each of the 15 selections in Hunt's collection seeks to illuminate some aspect of the "television industry status quo." Hunt, director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, is imminently qualified to edit this anthology. He has, for example, conducted studies that measured the level of black on-screen representation in television and has also examined how blacks are represented. The Screen Actors Guild commissioned the reports.

However, it would have helped – in terms of credibility – to have even the briefest "about the authors" section. Readers learn where these articles appeared but nothing about who wrote them. Some of the selections, frankly, perform their mission with greater readability than others. Fortunately, cogent, provocative arguments prevail for most of the essays and make this book valuable in a world where the news media too often skim over these concerns.

Let's look at some of the key questions raised.

CONTROL

Neither viewers nor the "invisible hand of the marketplace," Hunt himself argues in the first essay, determine what gets on TV. Contemporary broadcast media are increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. "In 2002, for example, subsidiaries of the `Big 5' media conglomerates accounted for nearly 81 per cent of the programs" scheduled. Furthermore, Hunt adds, network television remains "a highly insular industry in which white decision makers typically reproduce themselves by hiring other whites who share similar experiences and tastes. White males, in particular, have traditionally occupied nearly all the industry `green-lighting' positions—the positions from which it is decided which projects will be made, with what size budget and by whom."

CHANGE

In the 1950s blacks were presented as servants or layabouts—Rochester on "The Jack Benny Show" and the characters on "Amos n' Andy." Then came the sanitized "Julia" and "The Nat King Cole Show" (which lasted only one season), then "Good Times," "Roots," and "the Cosby moment," as Herman Gray calls it. "The Cosby Show," in which the Huxtables were professionals with five beautiful children, "quite intentionally presented itself as a corrective to previous generations of television representations of black life." Gray regards the show as "a transitional point" but confesses to ambivalence because it idealized the middle class and failed to address issues that confronted many African Americans.

The Senate Judiciary Hearings at which law professor Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her marked another milestone—but not a turning point. Both parties were successful black lawyers but their portrayals were still governed by whites, both on the committee and in the media. As John Fiske writes, Hill was considered either delusional and sexually frustrated or a victim of the same treatment black women had suffered in silence for decades; Clarence Thomas was either the oversexed black male of stereotype or the victim, as he put it, of "a high-tech lynching."

REALISTIC THEMES

Although many successful programs involving African Americans have been situation comedies, black television writers and producers have tried to engage in "head-on ideological battles around economic mobility and color," and Kristal Brent Zook discusses two of Ralph Farquhar's attempts. Because of his success as a producer on the long-running "Married with Children," Farquhar got a chance to develop "South Central" about a single mother raising three children in Los Angeles's inner city. The show delved into relations between blacks and Latinos, the dangers of carrying a gun, and color consciousness among blacks. Farquhar also created "Pearl's Place," in which interracial dynamics were central. Fox ran some episodes of "South Central" as a mid-season replacement, later cancelling the show. "Pearl's Place" was never picked up.

EMPLOYMENT

In 1967, the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ asked the Federal Communications Commission to require broadcasters to report annually on efforts they were making to increase employment and programming for minorities, and two years later the FCC promulgated its equal opportunity employment rule. Hiring minority journalists was supposed to help more accurately portray minority life. But because of the tightrope minority journalists must walk even today and the self-censorship they must sometimes practice, Christopher P. Campbell writes that they may adopt dominant newsroom values and make little difference in coverage. The alternative, as Campbell says, is fewer or no minority journalists; that is unacceptable. An article by one of these minority journalists, perhaps one senior enough not to fear demotion by discussing the pitfalls she or he has faced, might have been useful in this book.

CONTENT

Finally, Hunt looks at "black content, white control." In a case study of the on-screen presence of black Americans in prime time network television in the 2001 and 2002 fall seasons, Hunt found that Monday and Saturday were "black" nights on TV—accounting for 40 per cent of all black characters in prime time. Bear in mind that Saturday is the least-watched night of network TV. Furthermore, "black characters in prime time were ghettoized on the least-watched network (UPN)."

Not much is going to change if the pattern Hunt reports – periodic outrage over the portrayal of minorities, release of depressing statistics about the lack of progress of minorities in the industry, token attempts to appease critics, and then a return to business-as-usual – continues. Combined with the FCC's willingness to allow great concentration of media ownership, it's all a dismal picture.

Kay Mills is the author of "Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case That Transformed Television," published in 2004 by the University Press of Mississippi.