And the Clear Channel Crookery Continues To Be Exposed

Wired News is doing a three-part series investigating Clear Channel's nefarious practices in buying and operating radio stations. The first article takes a close look at the company's operations in San Diego:

"nowhere is its domination more prevalent than in San Diego. The world's largest radio company controls 14 stations there -- a half-dozen more than anywhere else in the United States -- and it still has room to grow by looking to the south.... Over the past three years, Clear Channel programmers sacked San Diego disc jockeys and replaced them with voices from out of town, hoodwinked listeners by airing national contests as if they were local, and rolled out cookie-cutter radio formats designed elsewhere. Meanwhile, the company sweet-talked Mexican station owners across the border and tore through legal loopholes in order to build its mini-empire."

What's most amazing about Clear Channel is not its anti-competitive drive and willingness to bend the rules to breaking. No, it's the absolutely brazen way in which the company goes about its business, flaunting its tactics as apparent open challenge to anyone -- competitors, Congress, the FCC -- to do anything about it. These tactics are largely credited to Clear Channel's former radio CEO, Randy Michaels, who was just reassigned to the company's new technologies division. While Michaels' approach may be bad for the listening public, apparently stockholders think its good for them, since their reaction to his reassignment was to dump stock, causing Clear Channel's value to dip down 16.5% just after the announcement, leaving it off about 60% of its 52-week high of $61.99. Anyone see a connection?

Well, let me draw it out anyway -- what the "radio market" wants is not a market at all. What the players in the "radio market" really want is a monopoly -- and seeing that asking for and having monopolies pushes the market ideology a little to far, they'll settle for a strictly centralized and highly controlled oligopoly of a few super-big players. When you control 14 stations in a given city, you're the bully on the playground, and you dictate the rules that everyone else plays by. If you decide to drop ad rates, everyone else had damn well better. If you consolidate stations and run 5 of them with the number of staff that used to run just 1 or 2, well now everyone else will have to do the same to survive against you. Oh, yeah, and by soaking up the majority of the market, you soak up the majority of profits, too. That's the kind of shit Wall Street lives for -- Randy Michaels was the biggest crack dealer in radio.

Methinks now is the time to bust 'em. Write your Congresspeople and write the FCC. And if they won't listen, maybe it's time to fight fire with fire -- start a pirate station on the fringes of a Clear Channel station and blot the suckers out! Highjack their STLs! With so few staff (and so many piped in robo-DJs) for so many stations, they're already asleep at the wheel. It's like bribing an Illinois politician! Previously on the 'geek:

More Clear Channel Crookery, 6/25/02

More Clear Channel Schenanigans, 6/10/02

Radio Consolidation --> Radio Corruption, 3/8/02

Attacking the Nation's Largest Radio Giant, 1/29/02

Posted by paul at August 05, 2002 10:01 AM | TrackBack