Roland Martin on Black-Owned Media & the Economics of Power

We sit down with Roland Martin, a Houston original who built an independent media empire by centering Black audiences and telling the full story. After the laughs about Texas teams, Roland gets blunt about how campaigns and corporations treat Black-owned media like an afterthought. We unpack why “no” is a complete sentence, how gatekeepers freeze out Black platforms, and what it will take to build real scale. We also dig into the shifting Black electorate and the cost of misinformation as well as why investing in trusted Black news is a democracy imperative.