this might be sort of away from your point (which was good), but man weren't there all kinds of problems with BET? The narrative I had been given was that things got bad with Viacom in charge. Basically instead of being any kind of positive thing, it's become the result of a bunch of white guys in a room strategizing how to make money off of a black audience (that image in my head probably has a lot to do with the boondocks episode). BET on wiki, #criticism again, your comment is right and everything, it just reminded me of this and I'm not sure what other people think.just like it sucks that BET has to exist.
In a 2010 interview, BET co-founder Sheila Johnson said she herself is "ashamed" of what the network has become. “I don’t watch it. I suggest to my kids that they don't watch it," she said. “When we started BET, it was going to be the Ebony magazine on television. We had public affairs programming. We had news... I had a show called Teen Summit, we had a large variety of programming, but the problem is that then the video revolution started up... And then something started happening, and I didn't like it at all.