Founder of Black Entertainment thinks in green

Robert L. Johnson is hobbling these days, recovering from a ruptured Achilles tendon suffered in a Bahamas boating accident over the Christmas holidays. Many who know him are amused that the man who has ruled his business empire with a kind of raw competitive zeal is showing such unaccustomed weakness.

But Johnson -- the founder of the Black Entertainment Television that made him the nation’s first black billionaire when he sold it to Viacom two years ago for $3 billion, the fan of basketball who just became the first African American to own a major league sports team with his $300-million purchase of the NBA expansion team in Charlotte -- does not see the humor.

His attitude is diffident, but his goal is clear: to be first in everything he touches. “Had there been equal opportunity for access to capital or equal opportunity for access to education, I wouldn’t necessarily have been the first guy to start a black cable network or the first guy to buy an NBA team,” he recently told Cable World magazine. As W.C. Fields might have put it, except for the honor, he’d rather be in Philadelphia.

Johnson won the franchise from competing bidder Larry Bird, a basketball great whose eyes welled with tears when he lost. Basketball officials all but cried too, saying they hope Bird gets the next team. One wag said of Johnson, “Not many people beat Larry Bird one on one.”

Johnson doesn’t care whom he beats; he just wants to win. In the 1990s, when a rival group of cable owners tried to start a second black network, one with more public affairs shows and fewer violent, sexually explicit rap videos compared with BET’s programming, Johnson muscled them into bankruptcy, according to those in the cable industry. And he resents anyone who suggests that he is any different from any hard-driving, bottom-line white businessman who plays for keeps.

“The fact that I am African American was a plus,” Johnson said of the politically sensitive basketball league in a recent interview with Business Wire. “But at the end of the day, if I didn’t have the credibility or experience, there’s no way.”

The thing of it is, the 56-year-old Johnson may be black, but he thinks green. One former business associate put it this way: “There are times when Bob likes being an African American leader, and times when he likes being wealthy.”

He is the ninth of 10 children born in Hickory, Miss., and the only one to graduate from college. His father sold timber and his mother taught school. When he was a kid, Archie and Edna Johnson went north, to Freeport, Ill. A high school teacher shamed Johnson into going to college, according to a friend, by asking for a show of hands by those seeking higher education and frowning at him when he was the only one who failed to raise his.

At the University of Illinois he fell in love with Sheila Crump, a cheerleader and violinist. In part to impress her family, he got a graduate degree in public administration from Princeton. The two married, had two children and have since divorced.

Johnson came to Washington after college, working first at the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, later as press secretary to D.C. delegate Walter Fauntroy. In 1976, at 30, he took a job as a lobbyist for the National Cable Television Assn.

Two years later, as a vice president for the association, he accompanied a businessman on a sales pitch to Capitol Hill. They were there to brief Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.), a passionate advocate for seniors, about a new cable network for the elderly. That idea crashed, but Johnson borrowed the proposal and adapted it for black viewers.

He could see the promise. Capitalizing on the dawning age of cable television and the burgeoning black middle class, Johnson borrowed $15,000 and then persuaded cable tycoon John Malone to invest $500,000 in the idea of an all-black network. He also talked to cable pioneer Bob Rosencrans, who offered him time on his satellites. Blacks constitute about 12% of the viewing public, and cable operators liked the idea of a targeted black network.

On Jan. 8, 1980, BET went on the air.

Starting small

At first, the fledgling network’s programming consisted of a few hours of old movies on Friday nights. The first BET broadcast was a 1974 movie about an African safari called “Visit to a Chief’s Son.” Johnson had to drive to Virginia to watch it, because the District of Columbia did not yet have cable.

For its first six years, BET lost money. In 1989 Johnson lobbied for higher fees from local cable franchises, winning an increase from 2.5 cents to 5 cents per subscriber. Noting the explosive success of MTV, he soon added hip-hop music and edgy videos, and BET took off.

Critics dogged him. Pilloried for firing popular talk show host Tavis Smiley in 2001 after Smiley aired an exclusive interview on ABC and for the quality of BET’s content in general (late last year, the network slashed its public affairs programming in favor of rap videos and gangsta movies) Johnson defended his choices on grounds of the bottom line.

“We understood that we were not running a popularity contest for Hollywood, and we were not trying to be socially redeeming for black intellectuals,” he told Forbes magazine in a 2001 interview with Brett Pulley, now at work on an unauthorized biography. “We had the right to run our business the same way that MTV and HBO run theirs.”

In 1992, an era during which he was continually assailed for not “giving back to the community,” he said during an interview with C-SPAN: “I don’t want to be seen as a hero to younger people. I want to be seen as a good, solid business guy who goes out and does a job, and the job is to build a business. In the black community there’s always a rush to see a ‘role model,’ but we need less hero worship. There are thousands of white businessmen who never get asked, ‘Are you a hero?’ and never are asked what they have given back to the white community.”

Giving back

In his deal with Viacom, Johnson will oversee BET until the end of 2005. Nowadays, the network has a 5 1/2-acre campus in Washington, D.C., where Johnson lives, 350 employees nationwide and 74 million subscribers. And Johnson has started to give back. Long a major contributor to the Democratic Party, this month alone he donated $3 million to the National Underground Railroad Museum in Cincinnati, $3.5 million to the National Cable Television Center and Museum in Denver, and $1 million to the Lincoln Center Jazz Project.

But for all his acclaim as a media mogul and a major media player, Johnson has an enduring ambivalence toward the news media. He once suggested to the Washington Post that BET and its founder would make a good profile, then changed his mind halfway through and refused to cooperate. He also declined to be interviewed for this article and asked friends and associates not to cooperate. Many obliged him. Those who agreed to talk tried to explain him.

George Curry, whom Johnson hired to edit Emerge magazine, a BET holding that was aimed at an upscale black audience and has since folded, recalls that Johnson often told him, “I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, I just want to paint it black.”

And Butch Lewis -- the most improbable of Johnson’s friends, a New York boxing promoter as flamboyant as Johnson is circumspect -- said the key to understanding Johnson is his business acumen.

“It’s like a game of Monopoly,” said Lewis. “If you don’t know the rules, you’re happy to get $50 when you pass Go. But Johnson’s played in the game enough, in real boardrooms, to understand the rules. He knows you’re supposed to get $200.”

What Johnson does is what entrepreneurs have often done in America: pitch to the lowest common denominator. And that, says one admirer, is an indication that blacks are beginning to make it in America, when they can eschew the highbrow for money-making programming. Detractors say he was so driven that he stepped on competitors -- especially black colleagues trying to start rival networks -- when maybe he could have just made more room at the top.

But Lewis sees what Johnson no doubt sees. He sees a double standard.

“If the race had been fair long before now,” he said, alluding to that mix of sports, theater and business that defines Johnson’s life, “there would be no such thing as a race card.”