NNPA’s Chavis looks to the future during ‘State of the Black Press’ event
27th March 2023 · 0 Comments
By Barrington M. Salmon
Contributing Writer
(TriceEdneyWire.com) — Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis took the opportunity March 17 to firmly connect the National Newspaper Publishers Association to its past, present, and future during his keynote speech at the NNPA Black Press Week luncheon, “State of the Black Press”.
Black newspapers in America have been the trusted voice for the Black community, speaking truth to power, since the founding of Freedom’s Journal in 1827. Serving as the voice for the oppressed and subjugated, Chavis said Black newspapers have long fought an unrelenting struggle for African-Americans to breathe free.
“Black business development, international and institution building and business in the Black community in the past 196 years was developed and led by Black church leaders and owners, publishers and other entrepreneurs who well knew that they couldn’t depend solely or exclusively on the benevolence, charity and generosity of slave masters or former slave masters to advance the cause of freedom, justice, equal and equity,” said Chavis, a veteran Civil Rights leader and president/CEO of NNPA, also known as the Black Press of America. “With that foundation and understanding of the evolution of the Black Press we’re much better able to explain and understand why the Black Press in 2023 remains the trusted voice of Black America. Truth is something you cannot buy; trust is something you cannot buy or fabricate.”
Chavis acknowledged the multi-faceted challenges the Black Press faces, including battling for advertising dollars from White businesses and corporations, being overlooked and ignored by the political and media establishments and adapting and adjusting to a rapidly changing journalistic environment. But Chavis declared that the Black Press is “strong, resilient, and getting stronger day-by-day by God’s grace and God’s love.”
He invoked the legacy of John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish who were the founding editors of Freedom’s Journal as the first African-American-owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Chavis announced several initiatives which includes NNPA officials traveling around the country in 2023 in a series of “Black church, Black press, and Black family revivals,” he said.
“I’m not preaching but it’s revival time. It’s revival time,” he said. “We’re going to promote nationwide voter registration and massive Get Out the Vote efforts. The antidote to voter suppression is massive voter turnout. In spite of the oppression.”
As the Black Press faces its technology future, Chavis said he treasures Howard University’s School of Communications, and “all our HBCUs.” Although the rise of digital media has upended the traditional business model of media outlets and newspapers, Black-owned publications have had to deal with the same challenges, he said.
“In growing digital age, the Black Press of America in 2023 is advancing, making steady progress to engage the necessary technological innovations to ensure the future visibility and sustainability of the Black Press for the next 100 years,” Chavis said. “I know some are concerned about Artificial Intelligence. They think you can go and put something on the phone, and it gives you and answer. But we need to question who programmed the algorithms of the Artificial Intelligence. Really, it’s not AI, it’s intelligence that has been tampered with by programmers.”
There are new pressures from competition from mainstream media and other spaces but even with all that, the importance of the Black Press is as vital to African-Americans as any time in the past, particularly with the White backlash against Black progress and pervasive racial animus that is fueled by the former president, his MAGA supporters and leaders of the Republican Party.
Claiming its place in the digital world means NNPA embracing and acting on smart, innovative, forward-thinking plans and strategies, Chavis asserted.
“We have to get into programming, coding, develop the ways and means to transmit truth that stands on the truth because it’s not a Black truth, or a white truth, it’s just truth. That’s where the Black Press comes in. Any progress we have made in America benefits all of us,” Chavis explained.
He announced the launch of NNPA World News, an app that aggregates stories about Black people in the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil and the rest of Latin, South and Central America and Asia.
Chavis, who was one of the key organizers of the Million Man March in 1996, questioned whether the standard tools used to gauge customer engagement and interest are meaningful and valid within the African-American context and hinted at the need to develop a new paradigm.
“Thus today, when measurements or metrics are used to evaluate the impact of engagement and the value of media penetration in particular media markets or communities, advertising agencies in particular, unfortunately do not know really know how to evaluate or estimate what it is that impacts Black America and other communities of color,” Chavis said. “It’s not just a numbers game, not just who has more click-baits or media impressions. It is a question first, of trust. Can we trust what’s being reported? Can we trust the source of information that’s being distributed?
Whether NNPA and the Black Press use traditional journalism or newer digital artforms to spread the news, one thing is clear Chavis said: the Black Press has earned the trust of the Black community and Black news publications and journalists will always be on the forefront of the struggle for human rights, dignity.
“Trust, especially for African Americans, is genuine and authentic. You cannot fake it. Trust, for us, is deeply rooted in the social fabric of our families and the communities in which we serve and represent,” said Chavis, who was a member of the Wilmington Ten and served almost 10 years in prison after being arrested and falsely convicted of conspiracy and arson. “In this contemporary era of what is referred to today as fake news and so-called alternate truth, there is no room in our consciousness for fakeness, half-truths and sleepiness over so-called ideological wokeness, as defined today by the misguided, hateful rhetoric of the politically ambitious, as represented by the governor of Florida.”
He said, “In other words, if it’s not the truth, it’s a lie. Truth is what will set you free …”
“… You cannot ban the truth. Dr. King would constantly remind us at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and the 1960s that truth crushed to earth would certainly always rise again,” Chavis intoned. “And you cannot ban the trust that the Black Press has earned from our commitments. The value of the Black Press in 2023 is that we continue to maintain the sacred, deeply rooted trust of the community in which we work and serve. That’s the reason why we proudly again assert that the Black Press of America in 2023 – via the NNPA – is the trusted voice of Black America.”
This article originally published in the March 27, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
