Clear Channel rewrites rules of radio
broadcasting
By Dante Toza
Oct. 8— Against a backdrop of red, white, and blue curtains,
emblazoned with the words of the constitution of the United States,
the heads of some of the world’s biggest radio companies gathered
for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual meeting last
week in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The exhibition
floor was crowded with curious delegates playing with new gadgets, surrounded
by cool blue lights. One booth gave away free radios to promote Family
Net, an internet service that filters out pornography, while the United
States Air Force had a sports utility vehicle on display, loaded with
state-of-the-art flat television screens, DVD players, and 12 booming
speakers, to convince broadcasters to play recruitment advertisements
for the military.
What was probably most unusual on the exhibition floor was the absence
of the biggest radio company in the country: Clear Channel.
Although the company is not a household name, most radio listeners in
the nation have heard the company’s music.
Clear Channel is a product of the deregulation of radio in the United
States through the Telecommunication Act of 1996, which overturned the
rule limiting to forty the number of radio stations around the country
that a single company could own.
Today Clear Channel owns over 1,200 stations, or roughly one in every
ten in the country, over 776,000 outdoor advertising displays, such
as billboards and street benches, as well as 200 major concert halls
across the nation. The company represents the biggest and most profitable
bands and stars in the business, ranging from N’Sync, Tina Turner,
and Pearl Jam, to sports legends like Michael Jordan and Andre Agassi.
But by no means did the company boycott the convention. John Hogan,
the president of Clear Channel radio and his rival Joel Hollander, president
of Infinity, were available to meet attendees who had paid up to $895
to attend the gathering, at a special “super session.”
Hogan told his audience that the radio multinational was there to provide
consumers with what they wanted. “It is really the audience that
is the litmus test. I have certain opinions and political beliefs. It
shouldn’t be up to me, it is up to the community,” he said.
Not every member of the audience at the super session agreed with Clear
Channel’s philosophy. Patrick Clawson, a local reporter, stood
up to challenge Hogan.
“Since Clear Channel came into our community and consolidated the
stations there, and began to take up a wide share of revenue from that
market, Clear Channel has eliminated entirely the local news department
from those stations. Clear Channel now broadcasts news that originates
from Baltimore over 100 miles away, and that centralized news agency
has never had a reporter in our community,” he said. “We had
a industrial plant accident in our area not long ago, where the plant
manager called the stations at about 3 o’clock in the morning because
they need to get the word out to tell the community about the accident
and also to advise the employees not to come into work, but he was greeted
with an employee [of Clear Channel] who said: ‘Sorry, all our programs
are delivered by satellite, and we can’t anything on air until
six in the morning.’ With the elimination of local programming,
how does this method of operation serve the public interest?” added
Clawson.
Hogan declined to reply to the question but media activists, who attended
the convention were eager to explain: “The problem with Clear Channel
having so much market power is that they start to be able to control
the outcomes of the competition that they are in,” says Pete Tridish,
founder of the Philadelphia-based Prometheus Radio Project, which supports
community FM stations around the world. “When you have a company
that not only owns one radio station but eight radio stations in one
town plus all the billboards and all the concert venues, and all the
promotion machinery, suddenly they have a level of power that their
competitors have no way to compete with. Once their competitors are
out of business they have free reign to do just about anything that
they please, that is the same just as any other monopoly.” Indeed
Hogan’s comments also contradicted the opinions of Lowry Mays,
the founder of Clear Channel: “If anyone said we were in the radio
business, it wouldn’t be someone from our company. We’re not
in the business of providing news and information. We’re not in
the business of providing well-researched music. We’re simply in
the business of selling our customers products.”
Yet when radio began in this country, it was not supposed to simply
be a commodity. The Federal Communication Commission, a government federal
agency that was established by the Communications Act of 1934, was charged
with allocating spectrum space to maximize “the public interest
and to encourage a diversity of voices so as to promote a vibrant democracy.”
Over the years this original mission has largely been forgotten, says
Norman Solomon, the executive director of Institute for Public Accuracy.
“The FCC has functioned much more as a lap dog to the media industry
than any kind of watch dog on behalf of the public to further deregulate
and further hijack the public airwaves for private profit.” Clear
Channel has gone beyond just axing news. Many believe that the company
fires anyone with political opinions other than their own such as Davey
D, the host of a popular talk radio show on KMEL, a black-owned station
in Oakland, California, that launched the careers of rappers like Tupac
Shakur and MC Hammer.
In October 2001 when the United States was on the verge of launching
its invasion of Afghanistan, Davey D broadcast an interview with Barbara
Lee, the only member of the United States Congress to vote against the
war.
KMEL, which had recently been bought by Clear Channel, heard about the
show and promptly fired him. Meanwhile company executives sent a memo
round to its stations at about the same time warning them not to play
any peace songs such as John Lennon’s “Imagine” or music
by the band Rage Against the Machine.
On the other hand, Clear Channel has not been opposed to all forms of
political organizing. In 2003 the company paid for pro-war rallies around
the country to support the invasion of Iraq as well as for a 33,000-pound
tractor to smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CDs, tapes and other paraphernalia,
at an event in Louisiana, because the bands had the arrogance to protest
against the war. Today the rules of media ownership that spawned Clear
Channel have been further loosened. The Federal Communications Commission
(FCC), which is led by Michael Powell, none other than the son of United
States secretary of state, Colin Powell, voted in June to allow companies
to buy more television stations and own newspapers as well as broadcast
outlets in the same city.
Critics include consumer advocates, civil rights and religious groups,
small broadcasters, writers, musicians, academicians, and the National
Rifle Association. They say most people still get news mainly from television
and newspapers, and combining the two is dangerous because those entities
will not monitor each other and provide differing opinions.
The Prometheus Radio Project been one of the leading advocates seeking
to block the new ruling. A month ago the organization persuaded a federal
court in Philadelphia to temporarily block the new FCC rules.
The delay will give Prometheus Radio Project time to argue that the
new regulations decrease the public’s ability to get on the air,
a difficulty apparent in Philadelphia, which has no public access radio
or television.
Meanwhile local broadcasters are starting to get worried about added
multinational competition as a result of yet another set of proposed
new rules that would allow national satellite radio channels like XM
and Sirius to broadcast in local markets by inserting “local”
weather reports from their national headquarters.
But Edward Fritts, NAB president, offered some support to the local
radio stations, which he said provided important public services.
“Think back to the blackout that paralyzed much of the Northeast
and Midwest. Huddled masses in New York gathered around battery-operated
or car radios to find out whether they’d been victimized by another
terrorist attack. And then — Hurricane Isabel, just a few weeks
ago. Many radio stations blew out commercials for wall-to-wall coverage
of the storm. I can assure you, there weren’t many people in Isabel’s
path who tuned to satellite radio for storm-tracking information,”
he said.
“We’re not against competition. But satellite radio was authorized
as a national programming service only! It is past time for the FCC
to issue a final rule barring satellite radio companies from delivering
locally originated programming.”
Dante Toza is a Correspondent with Free Speech Radio News
Source: CorpWatch
