Pimpin' Ain't Easy Selling Black Entertainment Television [Hardcover]

Launched in 1980, cable network Black Entertainment Television (BET) has helped make blackness visible and profitable at levels never seen prior in the TV industry. In 2000, BET was sold by founder Robert L. Johnson, a former cable lobbyist, to media giant Viacom for 2.33 billion dollars.

This book explores the legacy of BET: what the network has provided to the larger US television economy, and, more specifically, to its target African-American demographic. The book examines whether the company has fulfilled its stated goals and implied obligation to African-American communities. Has it changed the way African-Americans see themselves and the way others see them? Does the financial success of the network - secured in large part via the proliferation of images deemed offensive and problematic by many black communities - come at the expense of its African-American audience?

This book fills a major gap in black television scholarship and should find a sizeable audience in both media studies and African-American studies.

Introduction

1. Eyes Wide Shut: Capitalism, Class, and the Promise of Black Media

2. Now Thats Black! BET Business 

3. Im Rick James, BitchHHHH! BET Programming 

4. Impossibility of Us: BET Impact 

5. Its Your Turn: Black to the Future

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

In Pimpin Ain't Easy, Beretta Smith-Shomade problematizes utopian notions of For Us, By Us television by aesthetically, culturally, politically and socio-historically contextualizing the industrial trajectories of BET and the promise often left unfulfilled in its niched programming. Smith-Shomade's analysis offers an immensely valuable critical intervention that is engaging for scholarly and general readers. --Bambi Haggins,author of Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Pel3ß