Thanks, Melissa. Your comments are interesting.

I definitely recall MTV in the 1980s as a channel that aired mostly White music videos and BET (Black Entertainment Television) as a channel that aired mostly Black videos. I don't have the documentation but it's my sense that since the inception of both of these channels, MTV has had a much larger viewing audience than BET-hence the push to get MTV to integrate its selection of music videos that it aired.

For what it's worth, I rarely watched either of these channels. However BET was usually favored by my children over MTV.

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Here's an excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Entertainment_Television :

"BET: Black Entertainment Television was founded in 1980 by Robert L. Johnson, it offered movies, specials, news, music and inclusive programming targeted toward the African-American audience. Originally it only aired gospel, funk, jazz and soul music and added the hip-hop format in the mid-1980s in order to gain audience away from its competitor MTV which was responsible for selling hip hop to suburban audience, in 1989 it added its first hip-hip show Rap City which was created to compete with MTV's Yo! MTV Raps which premiered a year earlier. Rap City succeeded as it outlived Yo! MTV Raps and ran on BET for straight 19 years" ...