From the Editor: Who Owns Black America’s Story?

Black Media Digital History by Dr. Jerry Doby, Editor-in-Chief, The Hype Magazine

More than 199,000 pieces of journalism documenting Black life, politics, entertainment, and culture recently disappeared from their original home on the internet.

They were not destroyed.

Someone else had to save them.

That distinction has stayed with me.

BET, the media company created more than four decades ago to provide Black America with a national platform, relaunched BET.com in August as a video-first destination. The company said it was moving away from what it called a traditional standalone-publisher model and toward video distributed across BET, YouTube, social media, Paramount+ and other platforms. A day later, BET announced a Community Reporting Initiative intended to create opportunities for multimedia journalists in New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta, Washington, Houston and Kentucky. (Paramount Press Express)

Those are significant facts because they complicate the story.

BET is not saying it no longer intends to cover Black communities. In fact, its public position is that it is building a new method of doing precisely that.

But its years of written digital journalism were removed from BET’s live website.

On Sept. 8, the Internet Archive reported that it had preserved more than 199,000 BET articles and made them available through the Wayback Machine and a searchable BET explorer. (Library Journal infoDOCKET)

The record survived.

Its institutional home disappeared.

That is where this story began for me.

When Joy-Ann Reid Sounded the Alarm

Veteran journalist Joy-Ann Reid brought additional attention to the issue through an Instagram post that was difficult to misunderstand.

“The Ellisons are deleting the history of BET News,” Reid wrote.

She reposted commentary describing the removal as the disappearance of a piece of Black history and raising the question of what happens to that history when a media company’s business model changes.

I understood the alarm immediately.

I also wanted to examine it beyond the alarm.

I have spent too much of my professional life dealing with journalism, publishing and the mechanics of digital visibility to treat the disappearance of a news archive as simply a website redesign. But I also believe strongly that the language we use as journalists has to go where the evidence takes us.

I have not found evidence establishing that David Ellison or Larry Ellison personally ordered BET’s written archive removed. Nor does one corporate decision, by itself, establish an organized campaign to erase Black history.

What has been established is that BET Digital’s written articles were removed from public view as the company shifted toward video. HuffPost deputy editor Philip Lewis reported the removal on Sept. 4, noting that some writers had preserved their work while others had not. His reporting was subsequently picked up by outlets including Black Enterprise, The A.V. Club and other publications. (Substack)

The more important question became something else.

What happens when the cumulative decisions of media corporations, advertisers, newsroom executives, technology systems and public institutions repeatedly make Black voices and Black historical material less visible, less accessible or less economically sustainable?

That question took me back much further than BET.

Almost 200 years further.

Black Media Began With the Fight to Control the Record

In 1827, Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm founded Freedom’s Journal, which the Library of Congress identifies as the first African American newspaper in the United States. (The Library of Congress)

Their reason for doing so still sounds remarkably contemporary.

They wanted Black Americans “to plead our own cause” and to oppose the misrepresentation of African Americans in white newspapers and literature. The Library of Congress notes that the publication covered abolition, national and international affairs, Black businesses, education and community life. The original mission and historical context are preserved by the Library of Congress. (The Library of Congress)

That is not simply an interesting milestone in journalism history.

It explains why Black media has always been different.

The Black press was created not only to distribute information, but because Black Americans understood that the people controlling the means of communication also influenced how Black life entered the public record.

Who was celebrated.

Who was criminalized.

Whose businesses were advertised.

Whose deaths were documented.

Whose achievements were preserved.

Whose political arguments reached the public.

Whose lives became part of America’s searchable memory long before anyone could have imagined a search engine.

The technology changed.

The fundamental question did not.

BET Was Once an Answer to That Question

Robert L. Johnson created Black Entertainment Television in 1980 as a cable outlet with programming for and about Black Americans. According to Harvard Business School’s history of Johnson and BET, the company became the first Black-owned firm traded on the New York Stock Exchange when it went public in 1991. Johnson expanded the operation into publishing, film, and additional programming before selling BET to Viacom in 2001 for $3 billion. (Harvard Business School)

That history is important to what has happened now.

BET did not begin as just another entertainment brand that happened to serve Black viewers. Its value proposition was tied directly to the absence of sufficient Black representation elsewhere in American media.

It existed because someone recognized a void.

Over time, BET.com became part of that mission’s digital evolution. Entertainment reporting, politics, celebrity interviews, breaking news, and cultural commentary accumulated article by article.

That is how archives are built.

Not all at once.

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to create 25 years of history.

Journalists simply go to work.

Then, one day, someone looks backward and realizes that yesterday’s daily reporting has become a record of an era.

That is why the removal of a digital archive cannot be viewed solely through the language of product strategy.

A corporation may own the servers.

But what resides on those servers can have cultural meaning far beyond the corporation’s balance sheet.

I Have Watched the Other Side of This Process

Part of why this issue struck me so deeply is that I have spent years working on the opposite problem: How do we make sure journalism gets found?

The Hype Magazine began in 2002 as a one-page community newsletter. Its evolution into a digital-first publication required more than simply putting articles online.

We had to learn what digital publishing actually meant.

I have written previously about The Hype Magazine’s path from newsletter to digital publishing because that journey became a practical education in how independent media survives technological change.

Eventually, those lessons led me deeper into search engine optimization.

In “Journalism SEO: A 15-Minute Routine That Gets Your Stories Found” and in my earlier discussion of how SEO amplifies storytelling to build online notability, I approached discoverability as a newsroom responsibility.

Write the story.

Structure it intelligently.

Give search systems enough information to understand it.

Connect it to related reporting.

Make it possible for the audience looking for that information to find it.

That work eventually became part of my 2023 research paper, “SEO-Optimized Writing: Removing the Mystery”, published in COGNITIONIS Scientific Journal. The paper examines SEO specifically in the context of digital journalists and publications and addresses how headlines, keywords, article structure, and other publishing practices can influence the visibility and reach of online content. (Cognitionis)

I later expanded that methodology in my book, The New SEO Playbook for Digital Journalists.

But the BET situation forced me to consider the same ideas from the other direction.

If deliberate digital practices can help journalism become more visible, what happens when the original page itself disappears?

Preservation Is Not the Same as Discoverability

This is where I believe the BET discussion needs greater precision.

The Internet Archive’s preservation of more than 199,000 articles is enormously important. Without organizations committed to digital preservation, material lost during redesigns, acquisitions, bankruptcies, and platform migrations can become difficult to retrieve or disappear entirely.

But an archived article and a live article are not the same digital object from the standpoint of an ordinary reader.

The original story once existed inside BET’s publishing ecosystem.

It could be reached from the publication’s navigation.

It could be linked from newer stories.

Its subject page could lead to related reporting.

Readers could encounter it naturally while browsing BET.

Search engines could associate it with its original publisher.

A journalist could use the original link as evidence of published work.

A researcher could trace coverage across time within the publication itself.

An archive can preserve much of the content.

It does not automatically reproduce the original pathways by which people discovered it.

That distinction has made me reconsider a phrase I have used for years.

I have treated SEO primarily as discoverability.

I now believe discoverability should also be understood as part of cultural preservation.

Not because an optimized page becomes immortal.

It doesn’t.

But because history that remains accessible, indexed, interconnected, and attributable to its original source has a different presence in the digital record than history requiring specialized archival recovery.

Digital erasure does not always require destruction.

Sometimes invisibility is enough.

A Decade of Warning Signs

Once I began looking backward from BET, I could not ignore the pattern of contraction around Black journalism over roughly the past decade.

In 2016, Melissa Harris-Perry’s relationship with MSNBC ended following repeated preemptions of her weekend program during presidential campaign coverage and a dispute over editorial control. The Washington Post documented both Harris-Perry’s concerns and MSNBC’s position that multiple programs had been preempted as the network increased breaking political coverage. Harris-Perry herself later said she did not know whether there was a personal racial component to her treatment. The dispute and competing explanations were detailed by The Washington Post. (The Washington Post)

A year later, TV One suspended Roland Martin’s NewsOne Now. In its own announcement, the network called the program “the only Black daily newscast on television” and said it had struggled to gain sufficient traction with viewers and advertisers despite four years of investment. (TV One)

That explanation deserves attention.

Advertising is not a side issue in this discussion.

It is infrastructure.

In 2020, Black News Channel launched with the ambition of serving an audience its founders believed was underserved by mainstream television news. Two years later, the network ceased operations and filed for bankruptcy. The Los Angeles Times reported on the shutdown and the network’s financial problems. (Los Angeles Times)

Then came additional changes involving nationally recognizable Black voices. MSNBC ended Tiffany Cross’ program in 2022 after nearly two years on the network. The Washington Post reported that race and issues affecting Black communities had been central to her coverage. (The Washington Post)

In 2025, MSNBC canceled The ReidOut. Associated Press reporting noted that Reid’s program had frequently addressed politics, race, and social justice. The network’s replacement included Black political commentators Symone Sanders Townsend and Michael Steele, an important part of the record because it prevents the cancellation from being reduced to a simple absence of Black representation. AP documented the programming change and Reid’s departure. (AP News)

Again, none of those cases alone proves a racial motive.

That is precisely why I stopped looking at individuals and started looking at infrastructure.

The view became more concerning.

When the Desks Disappear Too

In June 2026, Columbia Journalism Review examined the retreat of race-focused newsroom infrastructure across several major organizations. CJR reported that NBC News had shut teams devoted to reporting on Black, Latino, queer, and other underrepresented communities, CBS had eliminated its Race and Culture team, and Bloomberg and Politico had wound down newsletters focused on race. (Columbia Journalism Review)

These are not television personalities losing time slots.

These are reporting functions disappearing.

The same CJR reporting cited a particularly striking example at The Washington Post. Following the paper’s February 2026 layoffs, 45% of unionized Black staff members were laid off, compared with 37% of white guild members. Hispanic and Latino guild members were affected at an even higher rate, at 50%. (Columbia Journalism Review)

That matters because journalism is not produced by representation alone.

It requires beats.

Editors.

Budgets.

Travel.

Sources.

Institutional knowledge.

Time.

And reporters whose job descriptions give them permission to ask questions that a general-assignment newsroom may not prioritize.

Pew Research Center found that Black journalists were underrepresented among U.S. reporting journalists, accounting for 6% of reporting journalists in its 2022 survey, compared with 11% of U.S. workers and 12% of adults overall. (Pew Research Center)

Pew’s separate examination of Black Americans and news coverage found that 73% considered it extremely or very important for journalists covering Black people to understand the history behind the issues they report. Four in 10 Black Americans said it was extremely or very important for news about race and racial inequality to come from Black journalists. (Pew Research Center)

History.

There is that word again.

Ownership Is Part of the Story

Who sits in front of the camera matters.

Who owns the transmitter matters too.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Seventh Report on Ownership of Broadcast Stations examined ownership data as of Oct. 1, 2023. Across commercial broadcast stations for which usable data were available, the FCC found that Black or African American persons held a majority ownership interest in about 3% of stations. White persons held a majority ownership interest in 74%.

The FCC is careful about what those figures mean. Its report defines majority ownership according to voting interests and cautions that its demographic classifications do not always establish actual operational control of a station. That distinction matters when discussing the data.

Still, the numbers demonstrate how little of America’s traditional broadcast infrastructure sits within Black majority ownership.

Ownership affects more than profits.

It can influence editorial priorities.

Investment horizons.

Which archives are maintained.

Whether an unprofitable public-affairs program survives another season.

Whether a cultural reporting vertical remains strategically important.

And whether the historical record created by a newsroom is treated as an asset worth maintaining.

Follow the Advertising

I cannot write seriously about supporting Black media without discussing money.

After the national racial reckoning of 2020, advertisers announced commitments to increase spending with Black-owned and diverse-owned media. Nielsen documented initiatives intended to remove historical barriers to advertising investment and noted, for example, General Motors’ pledge to direct 4% of its U.S. advertising budget to Black-owned media by 2022 and double that to 8% by 2025. WPP supported Group Black with a $75 million ad-spend target. Nielsen outlined those commitments and the barriers facing diverse-owned media. (Nielsen)

But the numbers demonstrate how far there was to go.

According to ANA Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing data reported by Omnicom Media Group, diverse-owned media received $1.9 billion in measured advertising investment in 2023, representing 2.5% of the measured advertising market covered by the analysis. Black-owned media received $991 million, the largest amount among the diverse-owned categories measured. (Omnicom Media ByDesign)

Those dollars matter because journalism does not survive on cultural appreciation.

Writers have to be paid.

Editors have to be paid.

Servers have to be maintained.

Video has to be produced.

Photographers, engineers, designers, and producers have to make a living.

Archives cost money.

When we say “support Black media,” that support eventually has to appear somewhere on a ledger.

Otherwise, we are asking Black media institutions to preserve our history without providing the economic infrastructure needed to preserve themselves.

The Fight Over History Is Happening Elsewhere Too

I would be less concerned about the media trend if it were occurring in isolation.

It is not.

Since 2021, states across the country have considered or adopted restrictions affecting how racism, sexism, and so-called divisive concepts may be taught in schools. Education Week’s continuing national tracker found that 44 states introduced bills or took other steps between January 2021 and June 2026 to restrict teaching about critical race theory or limit discussions of racism and sexism. Twenty-one states imposed restrictions through legislation or other avenues. (Education Week)

Supporters argue that these measures prevent ideological instruction and race-based guilt. Critics argue that they can discourage accurate teaching about discrimination and American racial history.

At the federal level, President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, directed the vice president to work to eliminate what the administration described as “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers. (The White House)

The administration describes its policy as an effort to restore accuracy, national pride and what it regards as appropriate historical balance.

Critics see a danger in allowing political authorities to determine which uncomfortable portions of American history receive institutional emphasis.

We have already seen examples of the complications involved in broad content reviews.

During a Defense Department review of diversity-related content, a webpage documenting Jackie Robinson’s Army service was temporarily removed before being restored. Associated Press reported on the removal, public reaction, and subsequent restoration. Other pages involving minority military history were caught in the broader review as well. (AP News)

I am not arguing that BET’s website strategy and federal historical policy are the same thing.

They are not.

One is a corporate digital decision.

The other involves government policy.

But they intersect at a consequential point:

What information remains visible to the public, and who decides?

The Question Is Larger Than Erasure

I began this inquiry wondering whether what we were seeing amounted to an effort to remove Black history.

I think the evidence requires more careful language.

I cannot demonstrate that every newsroom layoff, every canceled Black host, every advertising decision, every deleted webpage, and every curriculum restriction is part of one coordinated project.

I don’t need to.

The documented consequences are serious enough.

Black journalists remain underrepresented.

Race-focused reporting operations have contracted.

Black media ownership remains limited across traditional broadcasting.

Independent Black outlets continue fighting for advertising investment.

Large cultural archives can disappear from their original publishers with a change in business strategy.

Public institutions are engaged in an active political dispute over how American racial history should be presented.

Those things can occur for different reasons and still produce a cumulative result.

Less Black journalism.

Less institutional memory.

Less independent ownership.

Less easily discoverable historical material.

That is what concerns me.

The Hype Magazine Is Part of This Record

I cannot write this from some imaginary position outside Black media.

The Hype Magazine is part of the ecosystem I am describing.

For more than two decades, we have interviewed artists before they became household names, covered executives whose decisions changed industries, documented independent creators, published stories from communities that do not always receive sustained mainstream attention, and maintained a growing digital archive of cultural reporting.

That evolution is part of why I previously documented The Hype Magazine’s transition from a community newsletter into a digital media platform.

At the time of publication, many of those articles were simply today’s news.

Years later, they become something else.

A first interview.

A career timeline.

A quote nobody else recorded.

A photograph of someone before history decided that person mattered.

A record of a company that no longer exists.

A description of what a neighborhood, genre, or industry looked like at a particular moment.

That is how I now understand our archive.

It is not merely a content library.

It is evidence.

And The Hype is not unique in that regard.

Every surviving Black newspaper, magazine, radio program, podcast, digital publisher, and independent journalist is producing fragments of a historical record every day.

The question is whether those institutions will still exist long enough to preserve what they created.

Supporting Black Media Means More Than Sharing a Post

This is where I think the conversation has to become uncomfortable.

We can criticize corporations when Black programs disappear.

We can criticize advertisers when investment disappears.

We can criticize media companies when archives disappear.

But audiences also make choices.

Do we subscribe?

Do we visit Black-owned publications directly?

Do organizations include Black media in advertising campaigns outside Black History Month?

Do publicists pitch Black publications only when they have a Black client?

Do agencies expect independent media to work for exposure while paying larger outlets?

Do companies invite Black journalists into major press opportunities before the story is already everywhere else?

Do we cite Black media reporting?

Do universities preserve it?

Do libraries acquire it?

Do corporations maintain the archives of Black media properties after acquiring them?

Do Black-owned businesses buy advertising from Black-owned media?

“Support Black media” cannot remain ceremonial language.

Support has to become infrastructure.

What Gets Found Becomes Part of What Gets Remembered

Years ago, I began asking how journalists could improve the likelihood that their work would be found online.

That question eventually led from daily newsroom experimentation to published research, articles, and a book.

I thought I was studying visibility.

I understand now that I was also studying memory.

My academic work on SEO-optimized writing for digital journalists began from the premise that journalism cannot reach its intended audience if the publishing process does not adequately account for discoverability. (Cognitionis)

The BET archive controversy extends that principle beyond today’s audience.

The interview we optimize today may become the primary source somebody needs 20 years from now.

The story that ranks in search today may become the first piece of evidence a researcher encounters while reconstructing an artist’s career.

The article that remains internally linked may lead someone to five other stories that would otherwise have disappeared into the depth of a website.

Creation matters.

Ownership matters.

Discoverability matters.

Preservation matters.

And none of them can be taken for granted.

We Still Have to Plead Our Own Cause

Nearly two centuries ago, Freedom’s Journal was created because Black Americans understood the danger of allowing other institutions to hold exclusive authority over their public image.

“We wish to plead our own cause.”

That declaration and the history behind it remain available through the Library of Congress’ preservation of the Black press record. (The Library of Congress)

The medium has changed from ink and paper to websites, streams, podcasts, social platforms, search engines, and artificial intelligence.

The responsibility has not.

Black America’s historical record cannot depend entirely on the permanence of a corporate strategy, the priorities of an advertising cycle, or the assumption that something placed online will remain there forever.

BET’s written journalism survived because an archive preserved it.

The next collection may not.

The next independent publication may not have an Internet Archive rescue campaign.

The next Black journalist whose beat disappears may take years of institutional knowledge with them.

The next culturally significant story may never be written because the outlet that would have recognized its importance no longer exists.

That is why I no longer view support for Black media solely as an argument about representation.

It is an argument about historical custody.

Who tells the story?

Who owns it?

Who can afford to keep telling it?

Who makes certain people can find it?

And who keeps it when the original storyteller is gone?

Those questions did not begin with BET.

They began long before any of us had a screen in our hands.

But in an era when an entire archive can vanish from its original home with a change in digital strategy, we have new reasons to ask them.

The Black press was created because our predecessors understood that controlling the means of storytelling was inseparable from controlling how history remembered them.

Almost 200 years later, perhaps our responsibility is not only to keep pleading our own cause.

It is to make certain the record remains where future generations can find it.

The post From the Editor: Who Owns Black America’s Story? appeared first on The Hype Magazine.