Sheila Crump Johnson Says She is "Ashamed of BET," the Company She Co-Founded

BET co-founder Sheila Crump Johnson, says she is ashamed of BET and that it is potentially making the spread of AIDS worst by promoting promiscuity in late night rap videos.

Well BET co-founder, billionaire Sheila Crump Johnson, unloaded on the company she founded with her former husband, Robert Johnson, during a recent interview. She said she is ashamed for the company and what it has become -- ghetto. The programming is a disgrace and I am appalled that BET let slip out of its hands the opportunity to be a positive force in the black community. Sorry, it's pure ghetto and that includes Mo'Nique's show. She also said BET was potentially making the AIDS epidemic worst by promoting promiscuous, unprotected sex in raunchy late-night rap videos. They couldn't even get the tribute to the late Michael Jackson right. They bungled it by having raunchy performances by Lil Wayne and others. My children have never watched BET. That's not the type of television programming I want them to even view.

“Don’t even get me started,” says the 60-year-old Johnson, who has since divorced and remarried (charmingly enough, to the Virginia circuit court judge who presided over her divorce). “I don’t watch it. I suggest to my kids [a 20-something daughter and a college-age son] that they don’t watch it… I’m ashamed of it, if you want to know the truth.”

She said BET is making matters worse, and potentially contributing to the spread of AIDS, by promoting promiscuous, unprotected sex in raunchy late-night rap videos.

It wasn’t always that way. “When we started BET, it was going to be the Ebony magazine on television,” Johnson tells me. “We had public affairs programming. We had news… I had a show called Teen Summit, we had a large variety of programming, but the problem is that then the video revolution started up… And then something started happening, and I didn’t like it all. And I remember during those days we would sit up and watch these videos and decide which ones were going on and which ones were not. We got a lot of backlash from recording artists…and we had to start showing them. I didn’t like the way women were being portrayed in these videos.” Source: Daily Beast

I agree with her and I wish TV-One would step up to the plate and blow BET out of the waters. BET is a disgrace. When a show like "The Tiny & Toya Show" They are only in the business to make money and not care one iota that they perpetuate negative stereotypes about blacks. BET could have made a real difference and become a real positive influence to the black community, but they let money get in the way. The reality is BET brings out the worst in the black community.