Air of indifference: how Clear Channel destroyed its own radio market.

• Author: Waldman, Paul
• Position: Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio - Book review

Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio

by Alec Foege

Faber & Faber, 320 pp.

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A year ago, Atlantic Monthly writer Virginia Postrel, in an article entitled "In Praise of Chain Stores," argued that the homogenization of our commercial landscapes is on balance a good thing. Morn & Pop's Hardware may be charming, Postrel contended, but with the exception of Mom and Pop themselves, most of us will be better off if there's a Home Depot in town.

But what about the homogenization of our cultural and informational landscape? That, it turns out, is a different story, a part of which Alec Foege attempts to tell in Right of the Dial: The Rise ol: Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio. Though today Clear Channel has fallen from the heights it reached just a few years ago, if you have any opinion about the company at all it is probably not a good one. As it ballooned in size to become the dominant player in the radio industry, Clear Channel came to symbolize for many people everything that's wrong with media today: a rapacious corporation, unleashed by its Republican friends to pillage its way across the American landscape, leaving in its wake hundreds of formerly unique and public-minded outlets, which were suddenly sucked into the corporate maw and spit back on a powerless public, delivering the same soulless excuse for news and culture to every community unlucky enough to suffer under its pitiless rule. Or so the story goes.

Clear Channel began in 1972 when its founder, L. Lowry Mays, cosigned a loan for some associates who wanted to buy an FM radio station in San Antonio. When they ran into financial difficulties, Mays found himself the owner of the station. When Mays and a group of investors bought an AM station three years later, Clear Channel Communications was formed. They chose the name because the AM station had a "clear channel," the term used to denote those stations that had exclusive use of their frequencies during nighttime hours, enabling them to broadcast to most or all of the nation (unlike FM signals, AM signals can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles, depending on the topography and weather conditions).

As it slowly expanded through the 1970s and into the '80s, Clear Channel did something unusual: it ran radio stations like businesses. At the time, the typical station was a poorly managed, family-owned operation whose owners may have had little idea if they were making or losing money. Though its penny-pinching earned it the nickname "Cheap Channel," the company made excellent profits. In 1984, Clear Channel went public, and by the end of the year it...