One Big Happy Channel?

Pomp and circumstance ruled at the signing into law of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Held inside the rotunda of the Library of Congress, a bill-signing first, the ceremony featured an array of bipartisan legislators praising the comprehensive package. Newly appointed Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich heralded the act as a jobs and knowledge bill. Vice President Al Gore stressed how public interest was central to the telecommunications revolution.

After speaking by videoconference with students at Calvin Coolidge High School in Washington, Gore watched as President Clinton signed the bill using the same pen President Eisenhower did in 1957 to sign the bill that created the interstate highway system, which had been written by ex-Sen. Gore, D-Tenn., the vice president's father. Clinton then used a digital pen to sign an electronic copy to be posted on the Internet.

In his remarks that day Clinton boasted that the "landmark legislation fulfills my administration's promise to reform our telecommunications laws in a manner that leads to competition and private investment, promotes universal service and provides for flexible government regulation."

Five years later nobody doubts that the law was indeed a landmark -- not only because congressional efforts to update the country's vast communications industries for the first time since the 1930s had themselves dragged on through the '80s and well into the '90s but also because the Telecom Act, as it became known, unleashed unprecedented deregulation and media consolidation, among the most pronounced in American history. Nowhere has that consolidation been more acutely felt than in radio -- where just two companies, Clear Channel and Infinity, now dominate the nation's commercial radio stations. The result, many longtime radio industry observers feel, has been the degradation of commercial radio as a creative, independent medium.

But Clear Channel and Infinity are also raking in the cash. So now the question is, who's next? Because just across the broadcast spectrum, big owners in the television industry are looking at what happened to radio and licking their lips. If they get their way, the same thing that happened to radio may well happen to TV: more consolidation, more homogenization and, of course, more profits for the few at the top.

In late 1995, when the Telecom Act was being assembled, it was most often portrayed by its backers as a way to allow Baby Bell phone companies to get into the long-distance business, promote competition, introduce the V-chip to parents, police Internet porn and deregulate cable rates. Indeed, the Telecom Act's laundry list of initiatives covered nearly 200 pages of legislation. Down toward the bottom of that list, though, was a provision, one that received very little public attention (Clinton never even mentioned it during his extended remarks at the bill signing), that lifted all ownership limits for radio station broadcasters nationwide -- and allowed them to operate as many as eight signals in the country's largest markets.

To describe the new law's sweeping implications for radio as "radical" would be an understatement. Prior to this law, tightly regulated broadcasters could own just 40 stations nationally, and only two in a given market. Years earlier, those limits had been relaxed, very cautiously, by the Federal Communications Commission. But suddenly, without the FCC's input or any public hearings, the kind of sweeping deregulation that most broadcasters hadn't even fantasized about two years earlier was ushered in overnight.

"We were watching the vote come down in a hotel room in '95 and we were high-fiving each other," recalls the former head of a major radio group, who requested anonymity. "We knew the multiple-station deals we'd been working on would come to fruition."