Writing in the nation’s first Black-owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm, stated: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” That was in 1827. This week, 177 years later, the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), is celebrating its annual Black Press Week.

A week ago, the need for an alternative to the White-owned media was underscored in a voluminous study of the industry by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an institute affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (The report can be downloaded from the Web site, stateofthemedia.org).

It offers some disturbing reminders about the corporate dominance of the news media. In the newspaper industry, 22 companies now represent 70 percent of the daily circulation and 73 percent on Sunday. Four companies – Time Warner, Hearst, Advance and Primedia – receive about 50 percent of all magazine ad revenue. In local television, the 10 largest companies own 30 percent of all TV stations, reaching 85 percent of all U.S. households.

In radio, the top 20 companies operate more than 20 percent of all radio stations in the country. One of them, Clear Channel, has unmatched clout because it owns more than 1,000 stations, including 191 of the 289 stations in Arbitron-rated markets. All three major networks are owned by large corporations for whom television represents only a small share of their annual revenues. And on the Internet, more than half of the top 20 sites are owned by one of the 20 largest media companies.

Does bigger mean better, as the conglomerates like to argue?

Not if you’re judging by content. Take those around-the-clock television cable networks. The study found that 68 percent of what you hear and see on cable TV is repetitious. And local television news has its own problems. The notion that “if it bleeds, it leads,” is still the order of the day. Half of the lead stories on local television stations are about a crime or a minor fire or accident.

Viewers and readers also have a growing distrust of the media.

Between 1986 and 2002, the study found, “the percentage of Americans who rated their daily newspaper as highly believable fell from 80 to 59 percent. ABC News fell from 83 to 65 percent, CBS from 84 to 64 percent, and NBC from 82 to 66 percent. Local news stations fell from 81 to 65 percent.”

The proliferation of news outlets has had mixed results.

“Network news, news magazines, and newspaper front pages carry a wider range of topics,” the report notes. “But a good deal of the new diversity is in lighter fare – lifestyle, entertainment, consumer news – rather than news about diverse communities or populations.”

Nowhere is that more evident than in the newsmagazines. Drawing on 20 years of data from Hall’s Reports, a Stamford, Conn.-based research firm, the study observes: “Pages devoted to national affairs, for instance, dropped by 25 percent from 1980 to the first half of 2003…There is less news on high culture such as museum reviews (13 percent in 1980 versus 10 percent in 2003), and, perhaps surprisingly, a smaller percent of pages devoted to business (11 percent versus 9 percent).

“… What subjects now take up the pages? The space devoted to entertainment and celebrity stories has roughly doubled since 1980 (and now accounts for 7 percent of the pages). Lifestyle coverage has grown from a scant 1 percent in 1980 to 4 percent in 2003. Health news, which often translates to news you can use rather than medical science, has more than quadrupled (from 2 percent in 1980 to 9 percent in 2003.)”

For reliable and substantive news about African-Americans, Blacks must turn to the Black Press.

For example, this week’s NNPA papers are carrying an exclusive interview with John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee-in-waiting. Despite the horde of reporters who travel with the Massachusetts senator and the dozens of televised Democratic debates, his interview with NNPA News Service Washington Correspondent Hazel Trice Edney provides answers to questions that the traveling press did not think or care to ask, such as the first time he took a stand on civil rights.

In another NNPA News Service story, Al Sharpton accuses Black Democrats who backed the unsuccessful presidential bid of Howard Dean of ending up empty-handed, a position they wouldn’t be in had they unified around his campaign.

These aren’t the stories that routinely interest the White-owned media. And that’s why the Black Press continues to play such a vital role by covering issues that are important to us and by pleading our own cause.