Clear Channel Communications (wikipedia), the nation’s largest radio chain with more than 1,200 stations, said today it has agreed to sell the company to a consortium of private-equity firms for nearly $27 billion, reports the Washington Post, the BBC and Business Week.
The buyers, led by Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners, also are bidding for the Tribune Company, which owns several newspapers and television stations including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant. The company’s broadcasting group operates 25 television stations, Superstation WGN on national cable, Chicago’s WGN-AM and the Chicago Cubs baseball team.
In a separate transaction announced today, Clear Channel said it would seek buyers for all of its television stations and 448 of its smaller radio stations, presumably because the private-equity buyers were not interested in owning television or small radio stations.
Clear Channel was founded by Lowry Mays and Red McCombs (former owner of the Minnesota Vikings) with the purchase of one San Antonio radio station in 1972. The company went public in 1984 and grew remarkably in the 1990s thanks to favorable FCC rules that allowed for radio consolidation.
It also popularised voice-tracking (above), whereby segments of speech, music and commercials were sent digitally from one Clear Channel network to another.
These were then cut and pasted into the radio programmes, giving the listener the impression that, for example, a DJ was taking a live request or was doing an interview when, in fact, they were not. Clear Channel, like other broadcasters both large and small, utilizes technology known as Prophet (get it?). The voice-tracking technology is combined with Viero, which automates the scheduling of programming and spots.
Clear Channel stations, with reduced staff and operating expenses, now dominate most major markets with multiple radio stations. Clear Channel’s radio group recorded more than $3.5 billion in revenues in 2005, more than $1 billion more than the number-two group owner, CBS Radio, formerly known as Infinity Broadcasting Corporation.
FCC chairman Kevin Martin served as the Deputy General Counsel to the Bush campaign in Austin, Texas from July 1999 through December 2000. It may be coincidental that San Antonio-based Clear Channel, AT&T and Cingular are now the largest radio conglomerate, telephone company and cellular operator (respectively) in the country.
Or perhaps not.
Bill Moyers has a Media Regulation Timeline and offers this observation:
The founders of our government didn’t think it a good idea for the press and state to gang up on public opinion. So they added to the Constitution a Bill of Rights whose First Amendment was to be a kind of firewall between the politicians who hold power and the press that should hold power accountable. The very first American newspaper was a little three-page affair whose editor said he wanted to “cure the spirit of lying…” The government promptly shut him down on grounds he didn’t have the required state license.
Nowadays, these mega-media conglomerates relieve government of the need for censorship by doing it themselves. So we’re reminded once again that journalism’s best moments have come not when journalists make common cause with the state but stand fearlessly independent of it. A free press remains everything to a free society.
