A Pioneer Dies. John Johnson, founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, died yesterday in Chicago after a long illness. A good summary of his life appears in the obituary by CBS and AP.
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I'm offended that media have paid enormous attention to the death of Peter Jennings, but almost none to the death of a far more substantial media person. Jennings was, after all, mostly just a news reader who sat behind a desk and read summaries of other people's work. To the extent he did any real reporting himself, some of it was hopelessly inept, such as his preposterously credulous and alarmist reports on AIDS. Does anybody remember how wildly wrong he was on that?
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He lent his voice and credibility to the suggestion that the whole world would be decimated by a "pandemic". At the time he made such assertions, half of all the world's AIDS cases were found in one country, the United States. But, oddly and inexplicably, that changed! All of a sudden, AIDS wasn't here, but way over there, in starving Third World countries where people have always died young, except that now those early deaths are "AIDS". Still, we are supposed to 'heed the warning of Africa' in our own lives over here, where we live under very different conditions and where AIDS has vanished as a matter of public alarm. Indeed, public service announcements promoting worry about HIV, the phony "cause" of AIDS, practically disappeared under the Clinton Administration, but returned when the antisexual, and especially antihomosexual, Bush Administration took over the White House. Despite the best efforts of Republicans to worry us that the sky is falling, nobody in the general public worries about AIDS here. Nor should they. Republican attempts to scare people out of sex are an abysmal failure, and rates of pregnancy out of wedlock and of VD (which are more commonly called "STD's" today, but I don't change my terminology to fit the momentary fashion) are sky high — without having produced a devastating AIDS "plague" racing thru American society.
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Jennings was wrong. He paid no attention to AIDS Dissidents (see, e.g., www.virusmyth.com), the scientists and activists who realized by mid-1987 that HIV could not possibly be the cause of AIDS, but that the bulk of AIDS was the result of years of stupid behavior by people who used multiple dangerous drugs, often in complicated and varying patterns that could not be replicated in studies, and exposed themselves to repeated serious infections from sexual activity. Those infections often included hepatitis, which in itself can kill and which produces liver damage that reduces the liver's ability to clear out of the body the poisonous chemicals that illegal drugs constitute, with the effect that they build up and up in people who continue to use drugs atop liver damage, to the point where they cause catastrophic immunological and neurological damage: AIDS.
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Tho Peter Jennings was entirely wrong and irresponsible in regard to AIDS, he did make some contribution in the area of raising awareness of the dangers of tobacco, but he was hardly a pioneer. The U.S. Surgeon General announced that in January 1964. Jennings didn't even start at ABC until later that year. (Sidebar: One bio says that Jennings attended, among other institutions of higher education, Rider College (now University) here in New Jersey. He never graduated from college, but managed to do quite well for himself nonetheless, didn't he?)
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Peter Jennings also fell into "the family business" when he entered broadcasting, because his father was a well-established figure at the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
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By contrast, John Johnson was a self-made man who made a major contribution to an all-too-invisible people's self-image and self-respect thru vision and hard work. As the CBS/AP obituary puts it:

Born into an impoverished family in Arkansas City, Arkansas, Johnson went into business with a $500 loan secured by his mother's furniture and built a publishing and cosmetics empire. * * * Johnson encouraged major white companies to advertise in black media. He sent an ad salesman to Detroit every week for 10 years before an auto manufacturer agreed to advertise in Ebony.

And he did this against the advice of friends.

Civil rights leader Roy Wilkins advised Johnson to forget the publishing business and save himself a lot of disappointment; Wilkins later acknowledged he gave Johnson bad advice.

Alas, Johnson apparently had no son to whom to pass on his "family business", so he passed it on to his daughter, just as Hugh Hefner has, bizarrely, passed along the Playboy empire to his daughter!
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This is all too common a pattern: a lot of supposedly powerful women, from media to politics, gain much of what power they exert not by their own efforts or virtues but by inheritance. And black Americans do not need more women controlling developments. One of the main problems — even perhaps the most fundamental problem — of the American black community is the absence of strong male role models, and Johnson did his people a grave disservice in not seeking out a compelling black man to take over the company.
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Nobody's perfect.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,838.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:13 PM