BET: King Of Black Mediocrity.

In the 1976 movie Network, talk show host Howard Beale tells his audience that the world is in neither the post-industrial age nor the information age.

"We are now a corporate society, a corporate world, a corporate universe," he says. "This world is a vast cosmology of small corporations orbiting around large ,corporations orbiting around larger corporations who, in turn, revolve around giant corporations, and this whole endless, eternal, ultimate cosmology is expressly designed for the production and consumption of useless things."

Some twenty-four years later, BET Holdings II, a small corporation that owns several entertainment-related brands, including twenty-year-old Black Entertainment Television, will now be orbiting around Viacom, the world's third largest media company. Viacom paid $3 billion for BET Holdings II in early November.

BET CEO Robert L. Johnson and Sumner Redstone, Viacom's chairman and chief executive officer, seem to be all smiles and love about the deal. Johnson says that BET has found a perfect home at Viacom, whose roster of brands includes CBS, MTV, UPN, and Simon & Schuster.

Some black leaders--including the Reverend Jesse Jackson and NAACP President Kweisi Mfume--have expressed angst that BET was swallowed by Viacom. This is laughable. First, Johnson sold the company to Viacom; fellas, this wasn't a hostile takeover. And second, for all the carping about black independent television vanishing because of the merger, let's face facts about what BET is and what it is not.

While 90 percent of African Americans who watch television know the brand name BET, Nielsen ratings indicate that BET's prime time shows garner around 1 percent of the black population, or a little more than 350,000 people. This, despite the fact that BET can be seen in more than 60 million homes.

Why so few viewers? Simple: The network sucks, and it has sucked for a long time.

Well, not everything. The news division (especially Tavis Smiley and Ed Gordon) has been the high point. And in mid-November, the network announced that its film division, in association with PBS, had begun production work on A Huey P. Newton Story. The film is being directed by Spike Lee, who will bring to it a level of cinematic expertise the subject matter and audience so richly deserve.

Generally, however, BET has been the king of black mediocrity in the corporate-entertainment complex. Let's not forget that earlier this year BET Holdings II killed Emerge, a truly independent and intellectual magazine.

In his 1999 book, Color Bars: Television's Diversity Dilemma, former BET executive Tom Jacobs scolds Johnson for building and maintaining his empire on the electronic equivalent of junk mail. From sexually explicit music videos, featuring epic levels of misogyny and violence, to near endless comedy showcases and celebrity infotainment, BET has never lived up to the promise that people believed was inherent in its charter--a network where blacks could see reflections of themselves in mirrors not controlled by whites.

"Bob Johnson has made it abundantly clear that he feels no responsibility to use his business as a vehicle for-delivering positive messages or socially responsible programming to Black America," Jacobs writes.

Johnson apparently also feels no responsibility to the people who work for him, as witnessed in his insistence on not paying equitable wages to comedians who whooped it up on one of the networks staples, Comic View. These brothers and sisters were making $150 per appearance, while BET was making millions in ad revenue. This should have caused a ruckus among black leaders and the masses, yet there wasn't a peep. If this had been a white-owned network, there would have been a boycott.

So hold back your tears: BET was involved in the production and consumption of useless things.

Fred McKissack, a writer based in Milwaukee, covers culture for The Progressive.