Africana.com the online news and educational website aimed at people of color recently merged and was subsequently subsumed by AOL Time Warner becoming a part of AOL’s Black Voices channel. Earlier this year the premiere African American magazine for black women Essence was bought out by Time Warner.
These examples of two well known black publications being bought by white owned corporate conglomerates present a problem for the independence of black media. These along with the selling of BET to Viacom a few years back leaves very few places where we can control our image in the media dominated by negative images of black people. The Internet as a media should be a place where black people can control the news, the image and the perception but that is compromised when the ownership of the content changes. More at BlackState.com
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