106 & Park’s Terrence Registering to Vote

Over the past two years as a blogger I’ve increasingly become more critical of BET.  I’ll admit part of it is because I have fallen victim at times to groupspeak and partly because it has been fashionable in some way to do so.  However my relationship with BET is much like my relationship with my ex-girlfriend.  Yeah, I’ve done some dirt but I also was around for a long time which gave me plenty of opportunity to slip up.  So with that said I must give credit where credit MIGHT be due.  Today (August 28) BET’s flagship show, 106 & PARK is scheduled to broadcast LIVE at 6:00 PM  from the Community College of Aurora’s CentreTech campus in Denver during the Democratic National Convention.

The show’s topic is slated to encourage viewers to register to vote. Co-host Terrence will be live from Denver while co- host Rocsi will hold down the studio.  The show is said to be part of a week long voter registration movement called “BE HEARD” in which viewers have been encouraged to register to vote online while the audience does right from the studio thus demonstrating how easy it is.

This is big in my opinion.  Now BET’s fairly new Viacom sister network MTV has been a long-time political awareness advocate with their Choose Or Loose campaigns but lets face it the black community, BET’s audience, is less interested in politics and more interested in being entertained.  I think BET over the years has done an excellent job of hypnotizing the aforementioned 24/7 so I don’t think it will hurt from time to time to slip in some constructive content even if its subliminal. 

Now I DO of course have a few problems with this.  When 106 & Park initially launched I can recall that to participate in the studio audience you had to be 18.  However the network quickly realized older fans weren’t live enough and with the increase of Lil Bow Wow and B2K on the countdown they had to appeal to a much younger audience.  With that said, the show’s target now is dramatically younger than this, say 12-21 (MAX!)  So could encouraging viewers to register to vote be all about smoke and mirrors to disguise a ploy for the network as a whole to appear more community and politically consensus when at the end of the day they’re appealing to a mostly unqualified audience?

My second problem would be perhaps slightly controversial.  I’d like to here what the Nation thinks.  Would it be so wrong for BET to take a stand in favor of Obama?  Newspapers and other outlets do.  You’re a black network and he’s our first black nominee.  Yeah certain station personalities have publicly displayed their allegiance but using that very valuable platform to back their obvious choice only makes sense to me.  On the other hand, having Bush and perhaps McCain in office would allow them to operate with less morality than I’m sure Barack would.  Cynical but probably true.