In the 1950s, radio was considered a wild frontier that could make or break up-and-coming regional talent. Frequencies carried stations across the barren airwaves that stretched through state lines and time zones. People like Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed could go wild and play a Little Richard record over a dozen times in a row with only his station manager to answer to.
DJs held fiefdoms, choosing to expose their audiences to new and different R&B and rock 'n' roll groups based on personal preference and local sponsorship - sort of a mom-and-pop system back before the FM stations took over in the 1970s.
By that token, if men like Freed or Wolfman Jack were the friendly local hardware store, the current media conglomerate Clear Channel resembles the huge faceless Wal-Mart - only instead of buying the same bucket of paint or napkins in every town, you get the same music, news and talk radio.
The Clear Channel media empire is mind-boggling in its size, power and influence. The numbers alone speak for themselves. Clear Channel currently owns over 1,200 stations nationwide, including 36 stations in the Washington, D.C., area. Through its subsidiary, Premiere Radio Network, Clear Channel broadcasts over 100 syndicated programs to more than 7,800 stations - most notably Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Carson Daly and Casey Kasem, according to www.ClearChannel.com. In addition, Clear Channel's Live Entertainment division owns and manages tours of Sting, Kid Rock, Neil Young, Pennywise and Linkin Park among countless others.
In the end, what does all this mean for the average radio listener? Common business sense dictates that the larger a corporation becomes, the more consolidated its product must be in order to attain maximum profit margins. So one must then ask himself how Clear Channel goes about this. One of the answers lies in the former "Pay for Play" system that was reported in Salon.com's controversial series of editorials by Eric Boehlert in 2001. This system allowed music labels to pony up huge amounts of money to give regional stations a set playlist with instructions on what to play and how often.
In May of 2002 ABC News linked this recent "Pay for Play" scandal as similar to the Payola controversy of the late '50s and early '60s, when DJs took outright bribes to play a specific record. The practice of "Pay for Play" was officially stopped by Clear Channel as recently as April of last year. Although given the company's extensive financial ties to a bevy of musical tours, it could be assumed that select acts are still given preference as far as airplay goes - essentially, the incentives to solidify small playlists are the same.
Homogeny extends to far more than just the music played. As many as eight stations at a time are programmed by as little as four people in a given district of the Clear Channel empire, according to Paul Ferhi's June 23, 2002, article "It's Crystal Clear Who Owns the Nation's Radio Market" in The Washington Post. Clear Channel's DJs regularly record programs for a halfdozen stations from hundreds of miles away, a practice called "voice-tracking." Occasionally, they manage to slip in some local flavor by reading from the city newspaper, or sometimes they even visit the stations where they are played. Accounts of these practices were reported in Wired magazine in August of 2002.
The rise of Clear Channel to this position of power went almost unnoticed by the public at large. But recent events have made it almost impossible for it to keep as low a profile as it has in past years. Last summer Congress undertook a huge bi-partisan effort to override new FCC regulations that would allow giants like Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting to expand their power through further deregulation. In previous years, these actions had allowed them to become media giants. But as recently as this past week, Clear Channel has been grabbing headlines for its new zero-tolerance policy toward content in the wake of the Janet Jackson contraversy.
On Feb. 24, Reuters News Service reported that Clear Channel had fired Todd "Bubba the Love Sponge" Clem for getting a record $755,000 fine by the FCC. The next day, Clear Channel announced on its Web site that "The Howard Stern Show" was suspended from the six Clear Channel stations that carried it, describing the show as "vulgar, offensive and insulting."
"They don't admit it in the press but they have admitted to me that they are doing this because [Clear Channel executives] are being hauled in front of Congress," Stern said to Reuters the day after the suspension. In this quote Stern makes reference to the congressional inquires conducted on the culpability of CBS and the NFL in the Super Bowl halftime controversy of last month. If the disclosure to Stern is believed, then Clear Channel's paranoia over being branded by the FCC as "inappropriate" may just be getting started. Given the extent of the company's station holdings, the landscape of talk radio may undergo a bizarre sterilization over the next few years.
These two instances prove that Clear Channel's increase in power and control of information has directly affected the burden that the company has to shoulder. The price for the national uniformity of thought and art is beginning to look like a rather costly one for the once unstoppable goliath.
Clea Simon of The Boston Globe projected that radio listenership is down as much as 13 percent since the mid-1990s. Brent Staples of The New York Times attributed this decline to extensive de-regulation of radio ownership standards and practices that passed through Congress in The Telecommunications Act of 1996. Also a significant factor is the advertising revenue loss from the suspension of the Stern show - a projected $12.4 million per year, according to David Miller of the financial group Sanders Morris Harris Group Inc. in a CNN interview on Feb. 24 of this year.
Clear Channel has now become the target of many progressive organizations such as MoveOn.org, who seek to break up the robber baron tactics of big media outlets. The rise in satellite and Internet radio has forced Clear Channel to invest a significant amount of money in the former and lobby extraneously against the latter. Radio Ink magazine has reported as recently as yesterday that Clear Channel has resolidified its investment of 8.3 million shares in XM Satellite Radio.
For a company that claimed to have pioneered new methods of broadcasting for the future, it increasingly looks as if the future may bring only more grief for Clear Channel.
