Revolution Televised.pdf

Was the Revolution Televised? 41
African Americans. As they gained more control of the medium,
programs such as PBS’s Black Journal were produced with much
different results.
Black Journal: Resistant News Coverage
We are probably the only people in history who were Africans at one
end of a boat trip and Negroes at the other end. The Irish got on their
boat as Irish and landed in the United States as Irish. The Italians
started out as Italians and got here as Italians. But we started on the
boat [African] and got off Negro.
Tony Brown, in George Hill, Ebony Images
Black Journal first aired on PBS in June 1968 as a monthly newsmagazine.
Sponsored by National Educational Television (NET)
with a budget of one hundred thousand dollars per episode, Black
Journal was one of the few nonfiction programs focused on African
American subject matter. Although initially run by a white producer,
Alvin Perlmutter, the black staff demanded true control over the
show, and by September, William Greaves, a black man, filled the
position. Greaves led the show to an Emmy Award for excellence
in public affairs in 1969. Black Journal also boasted a 75 percent
black technical crew and a 95 percent black production crew, an
unprecedented occurrence on a nationally televised program. 36 A
film school was established to train the minorities, who interned
with five New York production crews. The Ford Foundation, the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Carnegie Endowment
funded the school.
Because U.S. film schools generally did not accept African American
students, Greaves was trained as a filmmaker in Canada before
producing Black Journal. There he worked as an apprentice on
films made for the Canadian Film Board and learned to consider
documentary not only as an educational genre but also as a tool for
social change. 37 Greaves assessed the state of television and the role
of the Black Journal producer:
In short, the search for candor, for honesty and truth—rather than
hypocrisy and self-delusion—must become a basic component of
television programming. . . . On such a foundation the Black producer
of today and tomorrow will most likely build his programming.
For him the mass media will be an agency for improving mass