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Tuesday, April 13, 1999 By Tony Norman
Businessman Edwin "Eddie" Edwards has been called many things in his life: uppity, a role model, a media maverick, a credit to his race, a financial wizard and a country club-crashing Negro.
Best known here for his "ownership" of WPTT-22 and his determination to integrate the all-white membership rolls of the Edgewood Country Club on the eve of its centennial two years ago, Eddie Edwards is also a Pittsburgh TV talk-show host and chief exec of a firm listed as principal owner of seven stations across the nation. He engenders strong feelings of contempt and admiration on both sides of the city's racial divide.
Sometimes, Eddie acts like a scion of 'old money' in refusing to grant interviews or answer inquiries about his business dealings. But the suspicion in many circles isn't that Eddie comes from "old money." My thinking is that Eddie ain't got no money if white business interests are factored out.
Until now, Eddie has been able to dismiss critics as uninformed malcontents yipping at the trousers of a resurgent black capitalism they couldn't begin to understand. When various interests opposed his purchase of WPTT eight years ago, saying his Glencairn Limited was just a "front" for the Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., a Baltimore firm controlled by a wealthy white family, the local NAACP practically had a stroke.
"Maybe the idea of a black man in America being innovative enough to secure financing... might rankle this gentleman," then-NAACP President Harvey Adams said of attorney Mark Baseman, who led the fight against Edwards' purchase of Channel 22.
If Baseman could be dismissed with a flick of the race card, the same can't be said of Eddie's most formidable critic to date. The Rev. Jesse "Keep Hope Alive" Jackson is considered something of an opportunist himself, so if it takes an one to know one, Eddie may finally be in deep doo-doo.
Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition as well as several major media companies have filed objections with the FCC to deny Edwards four more stations he wants. And Sunday, The Washington Post, one of the media firms challenging him, reported that Glencairn is almost entirely owned by members of Sinclair's controlling family, the Smiths. Edwards owns just 3 percent of its equity yet is vested with 100 percent of its voting rights.
Outside Pittsburgh's insular black establishment, the move to block Edwards' bid to "buy" more stations has become a crusade to restore the integrity of the "minority ownership" law.
Jackson says given that 97 percent of the stock in Eddie's company is owned by the Smith family and that Eddie's stations are in the same markets in which Sinclair has already set up shop, this is a technical violation of an FCC rule limiting ownership to one station per company per market. After Eddie buys into a market where Sinclair can't legally buy a second station, he cedes control over every aspect of station operations to Sinclair for a fee.
Still, the FCC has upheld this deal, which Jesse calls a sham business, as legal.
This sounds like an old movie called "Skin Game," starring James Garner and Louis Gossett Jr. as two con men in pre-Civil War America. Gossett, posing as a slave, is "sold" to the highest bidder. After the sale, Garner rescues him, and they start the process all over again in the next town, splitting the profits along the way.
Sure, it's an inflammatory and insulting analogy, but you know things like this happen in America every day. But I know I'll never get an invitation to appear on the "Eddie's Digest" talk show now.
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