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5 “Regular Television Put to Shame by Negro Production” picturing a black world on BLACK JOURNAL devorah heitner In the first episode of Black Journal, before the opening credits, comedian Godfrey Cambridge appears dressed in overalls and a painter’s cap with a paint roller in hand and methodically paints the television frame. To the viewer, it appears that his or her television is being painted black from the inside—a potent visual symbol from the first national Black public affairs program. Initially, though, the symbol emphasizes a visual challenge to the absence of Black faces on television—a show that “looks” Black, because of the visibility of its Black hosts and reporters, but where whites still have significant editorial control. Reviewers, who mostly praised the premiere episode of Black Journal, tended to see the production as Black produced and something of a novelty. For example, Frank Getlein titled his review “Regular Television Put to Shame by Negro Production,” demonstrating, among other things, how deeply taken for granted, how “regular,” the whiteness of television was to many in 1968. Studying Black Journal today offers a window into the sometimes surprising collisions and intersections of Black Power and media. It gives us a sense of what was possible in this moment in the history of educational television (before there was a “public broadcasting system”—PBS) and when foundations and corporate sponsors seemed eager to respond to social crisis with dollars. The early history of the show illustrates the challenges of finding Black selfdetermination in a white- owned and -controlled medium. Yet the innovation of Black Journal, which was a surprise to NET, was that Black staff members were unafraid to bite the hands that fed them. They were in a position to demand aesthetically and politically radical content that often critiqued the other programming on public television and the rest of the dial as well as the broader situation of Blacks in America. Engaging what Catherine Squires defines as a “counterpublic strategy,” Black Journal challenged and provoked white viewers and gratified Black audiences by offering a Black perspective on Black culture and politics.1 77 After the screen is painted black on the first episode, host Lou House appears on-screen and declares, “It is our aim in the next hour and in the coming months to report and review the events, the dreams, the dilemmas of Black America and Black Americans.”2 Although the style and approach of the show would evolve and the balance of editorial power would soon shift, the categories of content in this first episode—stories on Black communities in the United States, updates on Black activism, coverage of events in Africa, reports on Black politics both mainstream and radical and on Black economic initiatives, and critiques of Black absence from mainstream media—typified the program in its first several years. Black Journal was an hour-long newsmagazine with arts coverage, hard news reporting, and interpretive commentary by hosts and guests. Early episodes were structured as a mix of in-studio discussions—often featuring House framed by dramatic blackand -white images from the stories he was reporting—alternating with short- and long-form documentaries shot in the field. The cinematography and editing of these documentaries resembled experimental and documentary cinema more than they resembled other contemporary news programs, though the program’s format was similar in some ways to 60 Minutes, which premiered the same year. Black Journal, like the many local Black public affairs programs that premiered the same year, originated from the sense of crisis brought about by several years of “long hot summers” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, which undermined any fantasy that the United States was moving toward racial consensus. The Kerner Commission pointed the finger at media’s culpability for exacerbating rioting and ignoring Black perspectives. After King’s assassination, an experienced white producer at National Educational Television in New York, Al Perlmutter, was working on a series about the urban uprisings.3 Aware of the lack of Black voices in public television and shaken by the assassination of King, he asked the organization’s program director to start a Black program using the funds from the riot series. Black Journal’s initial budget of at least five hundred thousand dollars per season, though small for television, was considerably larger than those of local Black public affairs programs such as Boston’s Say Brother, San Francisco’s Vibrations for a New People, or Detroit’s...

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