Time Warner bought BET over 20 some odd years ago. My view at the time and since was that they bought it to stop BET from potentially being the Black CNN.
They bought it and did nothing with it. BET loses money every year. They put out a lot of programs where black men are either gay or asexual.
Tariq said he was offered a huge bag for the Hidden Colors series. Way over its valuation. Why? To shut it down. White supremacy uses their money to keep us down. They use their economy.
When hip hop got big the major labels who used to diss the genre, came with a huge bag for the independent labels like Def Jam (and others) and all of a sudden instead of having acts like Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, KRS One, rappers who talked positivity, black unity and black conscious, they started signing acts that only did one of three things: 1. Gangsta sfuff where we are killing each other in lyrics. 2. Drug dealing and drug use or 3. Goofy shyt "Laffy Taffy" now they have devolved in to mumble rap. Word spread fast, if you were conscious, switch it up to gangsta stuff if you wanna get a record deal. The same thing will happen to Afro Beats and has already happened to Reggae (Island records).
The best way for us to combat it is simply do our own stuff. Independent of the major media. TBA and Tariq made movies that didn't involve drug dealing, hoeing out black women or trans and the community was hungry for the conscious stuff.
If we are going to make Gangsta stuff at least make it our own. Remember the youtube series 'Money & Violence"?
It was popping. Netflix I think was trying to offer the maker 10 mil for the rights. Just like the Blaxploitation. Originally independent.
The one thing we do wrong that other communities get right is they don't sell media that is about them that they make. They turn down a big bag because they see themselves as guardians of their own culture and don't want anyone else to control their voice.