be more appealing to advertisers, so they can make more money. That’s the game out there. I don’t own a single radio station. I don’t make a single decision as to what city I play in. If I did, I’d be on every single station.
What do you see as the mission of The Steve Harvey Morning Show?
Our job is to wake up and for the first 12 minutes remind people not to forget about God. Don’t forget about the reason you wake up. Don’t spend your life feeling alone like you have no answers. Don’t spend your life never knowing your purpose. There is a God, and God is available to you. That’s my mission in the morning for the first 12 minutes, and then after that we disperse information. We try to get people off to a positive, uplifting, laughing start.
Where would you like to see black radio go in the future?
I would like to see black radio go back to what it used to be. It used to be a place where African Americans tuned in to get information, tuned in to be uplifted. We didn’t use black radio to talk about each other, to talk about this celebrity’s hardships, to make jokes constantly about a celebrity’s problems. Celebrities have problems, and guess what? You’ve got problems, too. Celebrities are human beings and they have feelings. And so what that no one could find out where Jay-Z and Beyonce got married. It’s really not our business. And if everyday people would just come to the realization that the most important life is yours and that of your children, you’d have a whole lot more going for you. Just do your life. Fix what’s wrong in yours.
What have you learned most about black people–your listeners–during this presidential campaign?
Black people are a lot more involved than people have realized over the years. What we’re finding out now is that white people feel disenfranchised. Black people have been feeling disenfranchised for a long time. So now all of a sudden we have a black man running for the presidency who has a real chance and he has a real chance because African Americans and poor people have known what was going on. But now the disenfranchised middle-class white person is saying, “You know what? This ain’t right. We need to change it.” And they’re so disenfranchised they are going to change it anyway they can. If that means putting a black man in office then cool, we’ll do that.