Media Racism History 101: Part 2

In 2020 the executives and administrators who control most U.S. public broadcasting television and radio stations affiliated with PBS and NPR and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB], U.S. corporations and "non-profit" foundations (that don't pay a fair share of city, state and federal taxes), like Thirteen/WNET and WNYC in New York City, claim to be opposed to institutional racism and systemic racism in the United States and elsewhere.

Yet a Carnegie Commission report on public broadcasting in 1979 included some interesting observations about the historic employment practices and ownership record of PBS-affiliated television and NPR-affiliated radio stations which indicated that the U.S. public broadcasting system's PBS and NPR-affiliated radio stations have historically often apparently operated in as institutionally a racist way as the Gannett media conglomerate’s properties have historically operated. As The Report of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting Commission observed in 1979:

“There are few minorities serving as key decision makers (that is, chief executive officer, program or production manager, chief engineer, or chief financial officer) in public broadcasting stations. Of the 583 total key decision makers in public television stations in 1978, 16 (or 2.7 percent) are representatives of minority groups…

“…An additional facet of equal opportunity, insufficiently emphasized by the public broadcasting system, is minority control and ownership of stations. There are very few minority-controlled public broadcasting stations today. Of the 195 radio and 276 television stations in the United States in 1977, only 18 had 51 percent or more minority members on their board of directors. Eleven of these stations are located outside the continental United States (Alaska, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands).

And the percentage of African-American journalists employed in NPR station newsrooms dropped from 12 percent in 2012 to 8.8 percent in 2017, at the same time there were still "very few minority-controlled public broadcasting stations" in the USA in 2017. According to a February 2020 Federal Communications Commission [FCC] "Report On Ownership of Broadcast Stations," for example, 84 percent of all full-power non-commercial television stations in the USA in October 2017 were still ones which remained controlled by rich white folks.

Regarding NPR's apparent historical record of institutional racism, as long ago as 1990, a book edited by Jannette Dates and William Barlow, titled Split Image: African-Americans In The Mass Media, also noted:

"National Public Radio has played a mixed role at best...in relation to employment practices and black ownership of public radio outlets...During its spectacular growth from a modest college-based public radio network with 90 affiliates to a major national network with 377 outlets in all the major markets, a listening audience of 7.3 million, and a budget of $33 million, NPR did not incorporate much of an emphasis on, much less a concrete program for, African-American broadcasters, into its master plan. Hence, even though there are over 40 black public radio outlets in the country, only 7 of them have qualified for its lucrative Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB] Community Service Grants, which are used to buy and upgrade equipment and facilities. This is less than 2 percent of the qualified stations, which number over 300..."