Daily News Feed 7.01.08

Mos Def’s Ex-Wife Pens Tell-All Book
While kiss-and-tell books have been a staple of rock ‘n’roll, it’s early days for the genre in hip hop. Bestowed with the industry nickname Superhead, former music video performer and Virgin Islands native Karrine Steffans got the ball rolling in 2005 with her New York Times bestseller Confessions of a Video Vixen which explicitly detailed dalliances with entertainers, such as Sean “Diddy” Combs, Jay-Z and Dr. Dre. New Yorker Carmen Bryan followed with 2006’s It’s No Secret, which outlined her relationship with her daughter’s father, rapper Nas, whom she two-timed for five years with his rival Jay-Z, and on occasion with basketball star Allan Iverson. Now a Canadian woman in getting in on the action. One-time stripper Alana Wyatt-Smith, 29, who has a 7-year-old son with Toronto hip-hop artist Saukrates, has penned Breaking the Code of Silence, a memoir examining her 2005 marriage to American MC-turned-actor-Mos Def, three days after they met, as well as encounters with various professional athletes and celebs. (Continue Reading…)

BET Loses Sponsorship Over Content
BET suffered another setback this week when several advertisers pulled spots from popular network programs due to images of violence and profanity. According to Paul Porter of media watchdog group, Industry Ears and CNN, Proctor and Gamble, Pepsi and General Motors pulled their ads from Rap City and 106 & Park after the companies viewed “The Rap on Rap,” a content analysis of BET and MTV programming The study found that children were exposed to violence, profanity or obscenity once every 38 seconds. According to a CNN report, BET Chairman and CEO, Debra Lee dismissed the study, saying the network pays attention to the content it airs and edits videos. “It’s geared for kids but the content is for adults,” Porter told HipHopDX. “That’s what the study shows.” Porter also asserts that responsibility for monitoring content should not solely rest on parents of minors. “The standard excuse is about parents, but there’s supposed to be corporate responsibility too.” He goes on to add that the images of black people on networks like BET effect more than just the young people exposed to the content. “We’re the only ones presented like this in the world. It effects you globally, on your job, with the police.” While Porter—a former media executive himself—is a harsh critic of the network, he is not without solutions for the Viacom network. (Continue Reading…)

Bloggers Bemoan Zimbabwe’s ‘Stolen’ Election
President Robert Mugabe’s re-election sparked cries of outrage from Zimbabwean bloggers on Monday and demands for international intervention. Mugabe’s victory in Friday’s one-candidate poll was condemned in the West and by all three African monitoring groups who said the vote was deeply flawed. “Now we wait for the Old Man (Mugabe) to swear himself in to a power that he does not have. We wait for him to claim a throne that he stole one-dark-night-that-is-our-country. We wait for real international pressure and solidarity to force a transition,” Zimbabwean protest poet Samm Farai Monro, better known as Comrade Fatso, wrote on www.comradefatso.vox.com. Official results of the June 27 election, from which opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew a few days before the poll, showed Mugabe, 84, received 85.51 percent of the vote. Many bloggers said the figure was rigged. (Continue Reading…)