The Voice of America
Clear Channel, the San Antonio-based radio behemoth, has been blamed for everything from politicizing the airwaves to destroying musical diversity, but has the company everybody loves to hate gotten a bum rap?
(Page 3 of 3)
Nearly every one of Clear Channel's competitors voice-tracks too, in one form or another. What Big D and Bubba are doing is representative of about 9 percent of Clear Channel's total programming (though the percentage is far higher in small-city markets like Abilene). Voice tracking is deceptive, of course, particularly when remote disc jockeys, armed with cheat sheets from the local stations showing weather and local news, actively pretend to be somewhere they are not. But voice tracking is also a predictable response to one of the biggest changes in radio in the past decade, which has nothing at all to do with Clear Channel: the decline in importance of the disc jockey. People want music these days more than deejays (the rise of satellite radio is an example of this); voice tracking is an inexpensive way to bring higher-priced talent to small markets. It is also—as in Abilene—highly customized for local markets in a way that the alternative, satellite feeds of national shows are not. And again, Clear Channel's more prominent competitors, like Infinity—which owns 185 stations in the country's big-city markets and makes only slightly less radio revenue than Clear Channel—are doing exactly the same thing. In the Tom Petty song "The Last DJ," he bemoans the disappearance of the disc jockey who "plays what he wants to play." His complaint—and it is true—is that deejays no longer make music decisions: Local and regional program directors do. But deejays haven't made their own selections in forty years (except at college and public stations, which are not run to make a profit). To say that Clear Channel's bigness and corporateness have somehow inflicted this on the country is like holding Apple and IBM responsible for the death of the typewriter.
Nor is Clear Channel responsible for the radical reductions in local radio news staffs that began in earnest in the late eighties: The FCC did that. First it flooded the country with new FM licenses that helped drive half of the country's radio stations into the red, forcing them to lay off workers. Then it repealed the so-called Fairness Doctrine, which more or less required local stations to have their own news. This means that local news had been gone at most stations well before consolidation took place. The only exceptions were the biggest talk stations. Like the other radio conglomerates, Clear Channel centralizes its news operations; it has 110 news bureaus employing about four hundred people.
Then there are the myths. It was widely reported, for example, that Clear Channel banned the Dixie Chicks from all of its stations after singer Natalie Maines criticized President Bush. This is patently false. The Chicks were indeed banned from the airwaves but by Clear Channel rival Cumulus. There was also the list that was supposedly sent from corporate headquarters in San Antonio after 9/11, enumerating 150 songs that were not allowed to be played. This instance of draconian corporate censorship turned out to be an attempt by several Clear Channel managers at individual stations to be sensitive to their listeners. They made the decision on their own, without a command from San Antonio. "It was a way of trying to show the sensitivity that you would want to exhibit in any trying time, like when somebody dies," says Bob Cole, a Clear Channel deejay, talk-show host, and radio veteran who has the number one-rated morning show in Austin, on KVET-FM, and who was a participant in conference calls when the list was discussed. "It was never an edict or a mandate. We just didn't want to incite any hate or animosity." (Cole agreed to speak to me in spite of the company's refusal to grant interviews.)
The most famous story of all concerns a January 18, 2002, train derailment in Minot, North Dakota, that resulted in a deadly ammonia spill. Minot is a city of 36,500. Clear Channel owns all six of its radio stations. The popular version of what happened, liberally referenced at last year's congressional hearings, is that when city officials called the stations, there were no humans there to tell people of the danger because the stations were running on autopilot. The truth is that the spill happened at 1:37 in the morning, a time when few small-city deejays or engineers are working anywhere in America. Most either sign off or play satellite-fed or automated music. Clear Channel could not be expected to have fully-staffed radio stations at that hour. In any case, according to Bryan Obenchain, the editor of the Minot Daily News, the TV stations got the story first while the radio stations continued on autopilot, and this was one of the reasons that people got angry. But what you never read about was that Clear Channel's lack of promptness in responding was part of a larger failure of the city's Emergency Alert System, which included misunderstandings by the police and city officials about how to use the system. Clear Channel probably bears some of the blame. But nothing like the gross negligence suggested by the legend, which has been trumpeted across the land by North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan, among many others.
There were other incidents too, which have now entered Clear Channel's voluminous catalog of offenses. They include the antics of a Florida shock jock named Todd Clem, a.k.a. Bubba the Love Sponge (not the "Bubba" of "Big D and Bubba"), who was indicted and acquitted in the on-air slaughter of a boar and whose crude, often sexual talk resulted in a $755,000 fine for Clear Channel; the on-air slaughter of a chicken at a Clear Channel station in Colorado; the advocacy, by three Clear Channel deejays in Houston, Cleveland, and Raleigh, of hurting or interfering with bicyclists on the road by opening car doors on them or throwing things at them; and the pro-war rallies advocated by Clear Channel syndicated radio personality Glenn Beck and sponsored by some twenty local Clear Channel stations across the country.
But in case you haven't been listening recently, all of this is more or less business as usual in American radio. Last year the FCC received 250,000 complaints about on-air indecency or obscenity. The fines levied on Infinity, which pioneered shock-jock radio with Howard Stern and others, dwarf those paid by Clear Channel. The rallies sponsored by Beck and the Clear Channel stations were tolerated but not did not originate at corporate headquarters; they were also replicated at stations owned by Federated Media and Susquehanna Media, as well as at Infinity. All this is not to say that killing animals on the air isn't a horrifying thing, but it is not unusual in today's radio. Only when the government decides to take stronger action against indecency, which, in the wake of the Super Bowl, it appears to be doing, will this change. "Clear Channel is a victim of its own operating philosophy, which is local market control," says KVET's Cole. "Any local market is only going to be as good as its local management and its regional director."
IN THE PAST TWO YEARS, SINCE John Hogan took over Clear Channel's radio division from Randy Michaels, the company has finally shown both a new sensitivity to public opinion and an aptitude for reform. After the outcry in Congress and elsewhere last year about the common industry practice of taking payments from record promoters—so-called payola—Clear Channel fired its independent promoters and said it wanted to avoid even the appearance of "pay for play." In February Clear Channel fired shock jock Clem, purged its airwaves of the Howard Stern show (which it had bought from Infinity), and proclaimed a policy of "responsible broadcasting" and "zero tolerance" for X-rated talk. (Clear Channel's critics believe that Stern was kicked off only because he had recently talked negatively about President Bush.) It even apologized publicly for its treatment of bicyclists and agreed to sponsor several charity rides.
But bringing back the smiley face to Clear Channel—indeed, even breaking up the company—is not going to eliminate all the perceived evils of modern radio. After all, what has happened in the industry, it can be argued, is precisely what America's deregulation-minded politicians wanted when they changed the rules back in 1996. When you deregulate a huge, fragmented industry, a few big companies eat many little ones. Everyone knows this. And Clear Channel's attempt to build a national brand is as American as rhubarb pie. It is no different from what any other national chain store or restaurant or mortgage business has ever done. Clear Channel is simply the "big box" of radio, though it will never be able to match the wholesale destruction of small companies that accompanied the expansion of behemoths like Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and Citibank.
And back in Abilene, the evils wrought by consolidation in the radio business are not quite as clear as they may seem to Clear Channel's critics in Washington. There is no doubt that localism has taken a hit. There are more voice-tracked shows, which means fewer deejays. There are fewer radio workers than there were before the radio conglomerates bought in. There is less truly local news. But according to one small radio operator who competes successfully against Clear Channel, there are positive changes too, and the business climate is generally healthier there than it was ten years ago. "When the larger companies bought the smaller ones, it added a degree of stability," says Scott Powell, who with his wife, Amy Meredith, owns the Spanish-language station KKHR in Abilene. "There has been less changing of hands, less changing of formats." Meredith says that the advent of the big companies has meant both more revenue for all stations as well as more competition. "When we got here, KEAN held a thirty to forty share," she says. "It was so hard to compete against them. Cumulus's KBCY took them down and that loosened up buyers' minds to the idea that there are other stations. We actually do better every year."
And this, ultimately, was the goal of deregulation. Does it mean fewer quirky little stations that play offbeat or eclectic stuff? Of course it does. But deregulation was a process designed to create a better atmosphere for business, not musical diversity. And as this era has shown time and again, despite the loss of localism and personal service they have to put up with, Americans are embracing the big-box model. If you feel different, if you lament what has happened to radio, don't blame Clear Channel. Blame Congress, which rewrote all the rules.
My Library
