Black producers fault BET’s content

Although members of the black creative community are upset over the lack of opportunity to produce new programming for the black-oriented BET cable channel, executives of the channel maintain that their past efforts in that direction have failed to pay off. “We will be doing more creative programming down the line, but it doesn’t make sense for us financially,” BET President and COO Debra Lee told Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times. The channel, which devotes most of its programming to hip-hop videos, has acknowledged that it has also abandoned production on made-for-BET movies because it could not identify a market for them after they aired. But writer-producer Tina Andrews (Sally Hemings: An American Scandal) told the Times that the company’s policies are unfortunate. “You want to have a place to ply your trade and know that you’ll be treated fairly,” Andrews said. “But for now, BET does not seem to be the place.”