Throughout the last election cycle, liberals built up radio
conglomerate Clear Channel into a Frankensteinesque monster, created out of dead, soulless radio stations
and brought to life with the twin goals of destroying all good
music and serving right-wing interests.
But now that Clear Channel’s profit motive is helping bolster
the ratings of the Air America radio network, those who worked so
hard to create this dark mythology are furiously attempting to
deconstruct it.
Retiring a corporate boogeyman certainly has its perks. When a
Clear Channel station in Portland, Oregon, picked up Air America,
for example, Al Franken’s show went from a dismal 26th place to
third. Now approximately one-third of Air America’s affiliates are
Clear Channel stations. The liberal network is even getting back
into the Chicago market from which conservatives gleefully watched
it ignominiously removed shortly after debuting last year.
In fact, thanks to the much-maligned free market and the
corporations that service it, Air America is becoming what critics
said it could never be: a success. (Competition in radio, it should
be noted, is still stifled and limited, but it’s by hyperactive FCC
regulators, not corporate ideologues.) Clear Channel has certainly
been kinder to Air America than that curmudgeonly stalwart of the
left, Ralph Nader, who derided the enterprise as “Hot Air
America.”
“So what, we’re getting our message out there,” Al Franken
answered when recently queried about his connection with an evil
conglomerate by a reporter from a San Francisco State University
affiliated newspaper. “Clear Channel doesn’t dictate Air America,”
he continued, adding with terrifying bravado, “No one has ever
tried to dictate us, and if they did, I’d say, ‘F—k you.’”
Of course, it’s not so easy to turn the ship of anti-capitalism
in mid-stream, and some folks are clearly having trouble making the
transition.
“It is a conflict of interest for me because I don’t support
Clear Channel,” San Francisco State student Rebecca Farmer told the
same newspaper about listening to Franken’s show. “Clear Channel is
a huge conglomerate and kind of like a monopoly.”
Meanwhile, Justin Felux, an activist based in San Antonio,
chastised “white liberals” who have “in their zeal to find an
alternative to Clear Channel…thrown their support to a network
that is looking like Clear Channel-lite.”
PERHAPS THE PROCESS OF white-washing Clear Channel for liberal
sensibilities would be easier if the truth was finally told about
the faux incident that made opposing the conglomerate a
cause celebre: the blacklisting of the Dixie Chicks and
the CD crushing rallies in the band’s (dis)honor after lead singer
Natalie Maines said she was “ashamed” George W. Bush was from
Texas. Somewhere between the statement and posing nude on the cover
of Entertainment Weekly, Maines unequivocally put the
blame on Clear Channel for the furor, claiming the company was
using its power “to promote a pro-Republican, pro-war agenda.”
Liberals rallied behind their country music comrades.
Now, setting aside the valid argument that the First Amendment
is not a guarantor of radio airplay, the fact is that it was
Cumulus Media, a much smaller company than Clear Channel, which
banned and crushed the Dixie Chicks music. Despite Maines’
allegations, Simon Renshaw, her band’s manager, testified before
the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee that Clear Channel had gotten a
“bad rap.”
Indeed. Since Clear Channel does not force play lists on their
stations, some did temporarily stop playing the Chicks in response
to local outcry. But the conglomerate’s stations in totality
actually played the Dixie Chicks songs far more than any other
company in the controversy’s aftermath.
To be fair, on its face, one can understand how many liberals
would find cause for alarm. Clear Channel’s head honchos in the
Mays family are big Republican donors and their stations are home
to hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage. But as
Reason’s Jesse Walker pointed out when this partnering
between Clear Channel and Air America began to surface, “Even in
blue America, money is green.”
As Walker noted, a close, contested election combined with the
huge success of Michael Moore in film was bound to get executives
in all industries thinking about servicing a niche market.
IN A MAJOR ARTICLE on liberal talk radio in the Boston
Globe this week, Clear Channel executive Steve Watkins said
proudly of his company’s plans to expand its relationship with Air
America, “This dispels the myth that we’re right-winged.”
“We found that Air America is a real opportunity for us,” Bill
George, a programmer at a Clear Channel station based in
Providence, Rhode Island, added in the same article. “I think the
time is right. I think the talk world is much larger than the
narrow right-wing views we hear from Rush and Hannity.”
So now Clear Channel is also on board with the narrow left-wing
views of, among other, new Air America host and shock TV star Jerry
Springer, whom Jon Sinton, Air America’s president of programming,
described as “heavily enough anti-Bush to be credible for our
audience.”
At a recent event at the Loews Santa Monica Hotel, Franken
enthused, “It turns out Clear Channel owns a lot of stations!” And,
thus, the boogeyman becomes a furry little kitten to be stroked and
cuddled. It turns out the radio conspiracy wasn’t so vast or
right-wing after all. But let’s not hold our breath waiting for a
retraction or for the folks over at Air America to start advocating
the further liberalization of markets. The underdog rhetoric just
sells much too well abandon it, especially on the way up.
