When Sheila Johnson and her husband founded BET, their vision for the channel was quite different from what it is today. “When we started BET, it was going to be the Ebony magazine on television,” she told the Daily Beast. “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. And I remember during those days we would sit up and watch these videos and decide which ones were going on [air] and which ones were not. We got a lot of backlash from recording artists…and we had to start showing [their videos]. I didn’t like the way women were being portrayed in these videos.”
Johnson and her husband sold BET to Viacom in 2000 for $1.3 billion–a hefty amount of money that made them the first African-American billionaire couple, even before Oprah hit that mark. But Johnson, who has no affiliation with BET anymore, said she sometimes wishes she could take it back. “I just really wish–and not just BET but a lot of television programming–that they would stop lowering the bar so far just so they can get eyeballs to the screen…there has to be some responsibility. Somebody has got to take this over. Because with all the studies that are out there, this is contributing to an atmosphere of free sex, [and the sentiment], ‘I don’t have to protect myself anymore.’
Johnson recently produced a documentary about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Washington D.C. called The Other City, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday. “[HIV/AIDS] is a pandemic,” she said. “And now that the movie has come out we’re starting to hear from other cities that they’re having the same problems. Our goal is to take this movie across the country so that other cities start looking at themselves a little harder…Society and government really believe this problem has gone away. People don’t know that this disease is still around.”
