As I watched the below clip, I wondered whether Robert Johnson would’ve greenlit a series like "Empire" when he was still running BET (which he also founded in 1980, on a $15,000 loan, and a $500,000 outside investment), before selling the network to Viacom for a tidy sum that would make him one of the few black billionaires in the entire world at the time. The short and simplest answer is, likely not, if only because of what BET was during those years when he was CEO – heavy on the music videos, reruns of popular black sitcoms, a couple of news programs, and a youth-targeted talk-show in "Teen Summit."
There were efforts to broaden the network’s content library…
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