Radio Daze
THE
CANARY DIED
Consumer
advocates say this: Anybody who thinks media consolidation is
good for the country should take a look at what happened to radio
after its ownership rules were relaxed in 1996. Radio was the
“canary in the mine,” as FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein
puts it. Radio was deregulated and the canary died. In 1996 and
1997, 4,407 of the nation’s 11,000 commercial radio stations
changed hands. Even Chairman Michael Powell has declared himself
“troubled” by the egregious radio concentration.
Two companies, Clear Channel Communications, Inc. and Viacom,
now attract 42 percent of radio listeners and industry revenue.
L. Lowry Mays, the San Antonio-based billionaire founder of Clear
Channel, owned thirty-six stations before deregulation and now
has 1,225 in fifty states. In a decade, the company’s revenue
has gone from $74 million to about $8 billion. In its search for
efficiencies, Clear Channel has perfected what’s called “voice
tracking,” a deceptive technique in which centrally produced
programming — containing local allusions — is beamed
to the company’s stations, letting listeners believe that
the content is all locally originated. “It’s cookie-cutter
cacophony from corporate masters a continent away,” says
William O’Shaughnessy, president of Whitney Radio, a two-station
group in Westchester County, New York. He regrets that so many
local and regional radio stations — which formerly covered
the news of their communities — have sold out to the chains.
In the end, he says, “greed may finish us all.”
Local news is, in fact, one of the saddest casualties of deregulation.
In 1982, 98 percent of U.S. radio stations had news operations.
Now only 67 percent do, and half of the 12,000 radio news staffers
are part-timers. Radio news directors are an endangered species.
For such reasons, Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin,
announced in January that he’ll introduce legislation to
limit further consolidation of the radio industry. — N.H.
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