The upcoming shareholder meeting of Viacom at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York promises to be lively as a number of women's groups are coming together to challenge Viacom to remove the indecent lyrics and images from the airways.
Among the 40 women attending to challenge the company will be shareholders Janice Mathis, southern regional director of Rainbow PUSH, and E. Faye Williams, executive director of the National Congress of Black Women.
Speaking to BlackAmericaWeb.com, Willams said, ""There ought to be new standards of decency for our airways. We are for free speech, but we want decent speech. That line has long been crossed, and it's time to do something about it."
Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition for Black Civic Participation has been leading an effort to get women leaders together to deal with the issue. "We have to call on all the people of good will to come together," she said.
Thanks for writing about the Viacom protest. The aim of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition's Dignity Decency and Equality effort is raise public awareness. The market is already responding to public demands for decency. CBS Radio quietly dropped dozens of songs from its play list late in April. BET has reduced the number of music videos it airs and is screening them for content. Master P - formerly a master mysogynist - is retooling his image. On the same day as the Viacom shareholder meeting, there was as picket of Interscope in LA, home of the infamous Fifty Cent. Debased images of young people of color are transmitted throughout the world, raising a serious national security issue. Do we really want thugs and video vixens as the image of America 40 years from now when the nation is predominantly black and brown?
Posted by: Janice L. Mathis | June 7, 2007 7:56 AM | Permalink to Comment