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

by Alec Foege

Overview

In Right of the Dial, Alec Foege explores how the mammoth media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications evolved from a local radio broadcasting operation, founded in 1972, into one of the biggest, most profitable, and most polarizing corporations in the country. During its heyday, critics accused Clear Channel, the fourth-largest media company in the United States and the nation's largest owner of radio stations, of ruining American pop culture and cited it as a symbol of the evils of media monopolization, while fans hailed it as a business dynamo, a beacon of unfettered capitalism.

What's undeniable is that as the owner at one point of more than 1,200 radio stations, 130 major concert venues and promoters, 770,000 billboards, and 41 television stations, Clear Channel dominated the entertainment world in ways that MTV and Disney could only dream of. But in the fall of 2006, after years of public criticism and flattening stock prices, Goliath finally tumbled—Clear Channel Communications, Inc., spun off its entertainment division and plotted to sell off one-third of its radio stations and all of its television concerns, and to transfer ownership of the rest of its holdings to a consortium of private equity firms. The move signaled the end of an era in media consolidation, and in Right of the Dial, Foege takes stock of the company's successes and abuses, showing the manner in which Clear Channel reshaped America's cultural and corporate landscape along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865479968
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/14/2009
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	8.18(w) x 5.56(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Alec Foege has written for The New York Times, New York, Spin, Playboy, Details, Vogue, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. His previous books are Confusion Is Next and The Empire God Built.

Table of Contents

Preface     xi
The Controversy     3
The Birth of Modern Radio, Texas-Style     14
Clear Channel's Beginnings     33
War Stories     54
Anarchy on the Airwaves     78
A Brilliant Idea     96
Success (the New Radio Universe)     108
Billboards and Beyond     119
The Mergers that Transformed Clear Channel     132
The World's Biggest Radio Company     151
Concerts     166
The Backlash     187
Clear Channel Goes to Washington     206
Payola     219
Online, or on the Decline?     230
Tuning Out     248
Epilogue     259
Notes     269
Acknowledgments     279
Index     281

Editorial Reviews

A uniquely American saga of commerce and culture gone mad.” —Alan Light, former editor in chief of Vibe and Spin magazines

“Read this book and you will want to scream. Alec Foege tells a tale of rapacity and financial engineering that could drive one to socialism.” —Ken Auletta

“To those who care deeply about what has been lost, culturally, as Clear Channel has taken command of the public airwaves these last four decades, Foege's effort is a noble one. And the story he tells is as important as it is unnerving.” —JACQUES STEINBERG, The New York Times Book Review

“If you've ever overpaid for concert tickets or bemoaned the glut of advertising on the FM dial, [this book] will help you understand why . . . Worth [reading for its] juicy tales of ‘good ol' boy' nepotism and the sharp insights into a profit-obsessed business nicknamed ‘Cheap Channel.'” —BIANCA BOSKER, Fast Company

From the Publisher

Foege is an unabashed radio wonk, but he is particularly adept at translating the medium's culture and technology for a lay audience…to those who care deeply about what has been lost, culturally, as Clear Channel has taken command of the public airwaves these last four decades, Foege's effort is a noble one. And the story he tells is as important as it is unnerving.
—The New York Times

Jacques Steinberg

How the giant media and advertising conglomerate got so big. (Hint: It wasn't high-quality programming.)Despite the title, Foege (The Empire God Built: Inside Pat Robertson's Media Machine, 1996, etc.) doesn't pay much attention to the proposition, loudly voiced by its many critics, that Clear Channel is a vocal ally of the right wing, broadcasting Rush Limbaugh and contributing big bucks to the GOP. He focuses more on dissecting the company's role over the past two decades in massively consolidating America's crazy-quilt network of local radio stations and analyzing what that has meant for the industry and the United States as a whole. The Texas-based corporation was started by Lowry Mays, a folksy San Antonio businessman who invested in a failing country-music FM station in 1972, when 90 percent of the country still listened to AM. Buoyed by the deal-making passion of Mays and sons Mark and Randall, as well as the shortsighted deregulatory fervor and merger mania of the '80s and '90s, the company began buying up stations at an increasingly accelerated pace. Today, Clear Channel is the largest media company in the nation, owning more than a thousand radio stations, dozens of TV stations, hundreds of concert venues and hundreds of thousands of billboards. None of this was done with an interest in anything but the bottom line. The company cared not a whit about improving the product, Foege makes clear, quoting a Clear Channel dealmaker who once said, "programming is the shit we run between the commercials." Unsurprisingly, quality suffered as the company grew and flexed its muscles as a near-monopolistic power, running many radio stations in smaller markets by remote control andhomogenizing content across the nation. Close to authoritative but far from thrilling: Considering the tumultuous events the author chronicles, his account is surprisingly dry.

Kirkus Reviews