Minorities use the Web to adjust the color on TV - washingtonpost.com: ... Web television has been around since the '90s, but in the past year edgy new shows by, for and about minorities are proliferating on the Internet. Many of the new series take the form of webisodes -- episodes that usually last about five minutes, aimed at the short-attention spans of the all-mighty Millennium Generation.
"You can look at this as revolutionary," says Jonathan Moore, founder and CEO of Rowdy Orbit, which was launched in February. "It is giving people a voice and a platform to express themselves without judgment or red tape holding you down. Now they can go from idea to production to distribution."
For years, minority writers, producers and actors have complained about the lack of diversity on television. Last year, the NAACP Hollywood bureau criticized a "virtual whiteout" in broadcast television. "At a time when the country is excited about the election of the first African American president in U.S. history, it is unthinkable that minorities would be so grossly underrepresented on broadcast television," NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous said in a statement.
Robert Thompson, a white professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, says the lack of diversity in programming is counterintuitive, given the breakthrough success of programs such as "Roots" and "The Cosby Show." "The general politics of people who run television may have at some point been close to admitting diversity and people of color, but the fact remains when the NAACP did its report, the results were shocking," says Thompson.
