Inside Radio

This past weekend, a little bit of my past showed up on my doorstep here in Seattle.

It came in the form of the annual Radio Show, a trade convention hosted by one of the country's most powerful lobby groups, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). The NAB throws two conventions each year -- one for radio, one for TV and radio combined. I spent 15 years working in radio, and for the last several, as the head of a small industry business, I was a faithful NAB attendee.

About a dozen years ago, I got out, propelled by a combination of health problems and revulsion at the steady corporatization of a once-creative business. Since then, the trend toward McRadio didn't just accelerate -- it exploded, fueled by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the massive corporate takeovers it encouraged.

A generation ago, radio was frequently fun and unpredictable; stations were often unique reflections of a community, in part because big chains didn't exist. Companies could own only one AM and one FM in an area, and no more than seven of each nationally.

Today, America's largest radio chain, Clear Channel, owns well over 1,200 stations -- a full 15 percent of the country's total. As is common for the modern media conglomerate, Clear Channel also owns other media -- in its case, lots of billboards and much of the country's concert promotion.

Satellite technology and the advent of big companies has meant that stations now sound the same across the country -- in fact, your local station often is the same, with DJs in Dallas or Denver capable of being on hundreds of stations at once -- "it's ten before the hour" -- and indistinguishable from someone down the street. At times, the same programs -- Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Art Bell -- get beamed across the country. Staffs have been slashed, pricey items like news and public affairs dropped. With deregulation, the FCC no longer requires public service.

The frequent result -- bland music, predictable talk, no real news -- and the inability of local communities to have our own stations, has frustrated a lot of people. This past weekend, some of them converged in a park adjoining the conference center, and at a converted church a couple of blocks away, protesting the NAB and McRadio and generating new ideas in the rapidly blossoming world of alternative media.

The two groups were yards apart, and planets apart. What was most striking was that as I went back and forth, each group repeatedly proclaimed its passion for radio. But they meant completely different things. Outside, they were talking about radio's immediacy and the things that could be broadcast. Inside, they enthused over radio's ability to tailor itself to advertisers' needs. Radio, in the corporate model, is tomato sauce. While the scraggly protesters outside debated tomato sauce recipes, inside, executives talked about how to sell tomato sauce. Or cars, or sneakers. Or radio. Or culture, or news. Whatever.

The contrast was never clearer than in the only NAB session on the one issue the media protesters were most worked up about. It was titled "You're Consolidated: Pros and Cons." But strangely, neither the moderator nor any of the three panelists could actually find anything bad to say about corporate consolidation -- the wretched effect it has had on radio, for example, or the dangers of cultural and political hegemony it might pose.

Chuck Frederick, a Clear Channel exec from Cincinnati, where his company owns eight stations that reach 93 percent of that city's listeners, enthused of his industry's consolidation that "I don't know that we've done anything wrong," and claimed that "Clear Channel is like a very kind gorilla." Mike Carter -- owner of Kansas City's only three African-American-formatted stations, and the only non-white in the room (there were four women) -- called it "a fact of life for all the right reasons ... there's been a lot of money generated by [station] sales." Carter acknowledged that minority ownership has declined since 1996 (as has racial diversity among radio's employees). But he was more concerned that no more local stations were available for his company to buy than that he'd already bought out Kansas City's only other minority owner.