Niches or Ghettos? Episode 1.28

"ATLAS! I need that waxing scheduled NOW!"
-Sloane, today, 2:28 pm

If you haven't heard, there are not one, but two, gay pay cable networks coming to a television screen near you-- Logo and Here. Before you straight readers say 'who cares?'-- think about this for a minute. Are these new gay tv networks progress or segregation? By turning homo eyeballs away from the major networks, the impetus for showing gay characters drops, which is bad, right???

As we all know, there's no way in hell that Bubba from South Carolina is going to subscribe to a gay network, go to a gay bar, or even meet a gay person in his line of work at the chicken-processing factory. But he might tune in to "The Amazing Race" or even "Desperate Housewives" and learn that there are people out there who are reasonably normal, but gay. This same sort of criteria holds for other minorities. . .

Has BET really done the black community good, or has it simply enriched a few people? In the case of BET, I think most black folks would agree that it's more like the latter.

Are Telemundo and Univision encouraging Latinos to segregate themselves in a Spanish-speaking ghetto? Eh...every Latino I know [admittedly, only Angelenos] has no problem speaking both-- and will typically do so many times over the course of a day.

Questions for further discussion: Regardless whether these channels are good for minorities in the eyes of Bubba from South Carolina-- are they good for their respective communities? Answer: sometimes. The potential is there even if the execution isn't. Of course, all that really matters is the execution, so we're back to the 'sometimes' answer.

More thoughts on this topic will probably have to wait until after work-- but I wanted to get it out there.