Talk Back to Your Radio

By Elizabeth Daley, WireTap. Posted March 29, 2006.

Why Can't I Turn Off the Radio? So says the refrain of a popular song by Ne-Yo, currently on heavy rotation on hip-hop stations across the country. Many people may be asking themselves this same question as media giant Clear Channel homogenizes playlists, disregards local communities and makes life unbearably monotonous for people without iPods. If you are wondering how and why all radio stations started to sound the same, look at the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

The act allowed corporations like Clear Channel to own up to eight radio stations in each local market and removed any restrictions on the number of stations a corporation could own nationwide. Since 1996, Clear Channel went from owning 40 to 1200 radio stations.

With close to 95 percent of Americans listening to the radio, the messages and messengers stations choose to carry have an excessive impact on the communities. Radio is cheaper to access than television or the internet and it travels across racial and class boundaries, providing a common space. However, as media consolidation advances across the country, stations are increasingly focusing on profit, forgetting their responsibility to serve local communities in exchange for using the free airwaves -- a spectrum that belongs to the public.

But what does one do when the radio becomes unbearable? Usually, individuals have little recourse but to turn it off. In addition, every eight years radio and television stations are required to renew their licenses, and communities have a unique opportunity to challenge the station's right to exist. The FCC requires radio and television stations to prove that they have been accessible to civilians, responded to emergencies adequately and served the needs of local communities defined in the rather vague terms by the FCC as "accessibility, necessity and public interest."

According to Malkia Cyril, director of Oakland-based Youth Media Council (YMC), the last of these three things is most difficult to prove. But in a recent action by YMC, two local Bay Area Clear Channel affiliates were challenged with petitions to deny future licensing on the grounds that stations KMEL and KYLD did not serve their local communities and did not provide adequate access to their public records.

Systematically monitoring the radio, YMC found that local artists were not getting airtime, programming consisted of repeated top 40 hits, and shock jocks (a-la Howard Stern gone mad) staged outrageous stunts causing members of the community to be publicly humiliated. YMC recorded instances of DJs creating states of emergency on the Bay Bridge and pranks that sent DJs to jail for the level of danger they caused. One minor was solicited by the radio station and asked to strip naked and cover herself with bumper stickers. Onother woman sued KYLD after a DJ called her home and accused her of abusing her daughter. Patrons of a restaurant were held hostage by KYLD DJs, who pretended to be armed and ready to kill. Another mother received a call from a KYLD DJ who pretended to be a school district administrator. The DJ told the mother that her son had been caught "peddling dope," and only after the woman broke down and cried did the DJ reveal that he was from KYLD and that he was just "kidding."

Behind this commercially crass and tasteless behavior was Clear Channel, a national media giant that "like an octopus with eight arms" (to quote Malkia) operated centrally and took little responsibility on the local level. While these incidents represent only a fraction of Clear Channel's infractions, the licensing agreement only examines the relationship between stations and local communities. This means that while Clear Channel affiliates have committed far more misdeeds than the aforementioned, due to FCC regulations it is unlikely Clear Channel will ever be penalized as a whole.

Elizabeth Daley is an editorial intern of WireTap.

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