Domination fantasies: does Rupert Murdoch control the media? Does anyone?

Reason, Jan, 2004 by Ben Compaine

This is one reason why big business and business executives are regularly made the villains (see The China Syndrome, Broadcast News, and Erin Brockovich, among many) in film and television features produced by major media companies. In many instances, the profit motive means localism prevails over centralization. It is not likely to matter much (and indeed experience shows it does not) whether a local TV station is owned by a company headquartered in another city. The decisions for much news and information need to be made locally if the owner wants to attract its share of the audience. In short, both locally and nation ally owned media outlets are driven by the profit motive.

In fact, the notion that local owners of newspapers or TV and radio stations are inherently "better"--usually taken to mean more "objective"--than a large corporation has no standing in the real world. Some of the most biased newspapers in 20th-century history--McCormick's Chicago Tribune, Annenberg's Philadelphia Inquirer, Loeb's Manchester Union-Leader--were the creations of local ownership. Local owners are more likely than remote corporate owners to have ties to the local political and business establishment. Local owners may not have the economic resources to withstand a boycott by real estate or banking or similar interests should they risk some criticism of the local industry. Large chains, on the other hand, are far less affected economically by a short-term downturn in any one community. And it is less likely that the publisher is a prep school buddy of the mayor.

On the other extreme from local ownership, Clear Channel Communications has become the poster child for all that has gone wrong with media regulation. The Web magazine Salon headlines it as "Dirty Tricks and Crappy Programming." The chain owns nearly 1,200 radio stations nationally and is the dominant owner in many local markets. I am not about to defend Clear Channel's acquisitions or its policies, but the other side of the pancake has received little attention.

First, some context. Clear Channel's 1,200 stations exist in a universe of more than 10,500 commercial radio stations in the U.S. (compared to less than 8,000 in 1980). On a national basis, it owns less than 12 percent of all commercial stations. Its growth, as well as that of smaller chains, has been dramatic. But, again, there is context: Until 1985, a single owner could own a maximum of just 14 stations. By 1992 this limit had been raised to 36. Still, regulation kept size artificially low. Only in 1996, when the Telecommunications Act became law, were national limits eliminated, other than existing antitrust laws.

Salon's Eric Boehlert writes that after the "domination" by Clear Channel and second-place Infinity Broadcasting, "The result, many longtime radio industry observers feel, has been the degradation of commercial radio as a creative, independent medium" Yet anyone who remembers the radio of the 1950s and the '60s can recall a bland mix of Top 40 stations, sports, talk, and pop. There were, as now, a handful of jazz and classical stations. The late 1960s and '70s saw the unleashing of the FM band and its superior fidelity. There was a brief Golden Age of freeform stations that mixed psychedelic rock with more outre forms of music. But such "innovation" had fizzled out long before Clear Channel.