Bob Johnson on HGM
“As far as the ‘Hot Ghetto Mess’ issue, [BET President/CEO Debra Lee] has got the same problem that I had in that BET, for all practical purposes, is the only preeminent voice for African Americans in media and because of that it is given a greater responsibility and obligation by certain people that BET has to be a little bit ‘holier than thou,’” Johnson said. “We’ll let Jerry Springer get away with that or we’ll let Morton Downey get away with that or we’ll let the people at VH1’s ‘Flavor of Love’ get away with that. But when it’s black folks making the decision to do that, all of a sudden people start saying you can’t do that because you have a greater obligation. And then they go to advertisers and many white advertisers will head for the hills the moment they see themselves in the middle of a black controversial issue. They will stop, [partly] because they don’t really want to be on it; don’t value it; or they don’t know how to handle it.”
Johnson called the fallout surrounding ‘Hot Ghetto Mess’ a “knee-jerk reaction that has a chilling effect on creativity.”
“All of a sudden, creative people who want to tell stories or produce shows like ‘Hot Ghetto Mess’ are saying, ‘I don’t want to work on BET because they can’t doing anything that’s innovative or pushes the envelope,” he said. “I think that would be detrimental to creativity. I think it would be detrimental to the black community in allowing us to mature and let a lot of voices be heard.”
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The show itself was a mess. If the first episode is any indication of what is to come it will not last long at all. The biggest “We Got To Do Better†moment of the night goes to the producers of the show. They changed the name of the show but apparently did not have time to change the intros and the commentary where the host referred to the show as “Hot Ghetto Mess†a number of times.
Comment by crazyone | July 26, 2007
Yeah, I can certainly agree. Changing the name without changing the tagline that was used over and over again was very sloppy.
Comment by Duane | July 26, 2007