Tedium - Not-So-Clear Channel 📻

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Why the Clear Channel memorandum controversy was really a controversy about Clear Channel’s breakneck growth

You can look at Clear Channel’s callout of “lyrically questionable” songs in some pretty interesting ways in retrospect.

Was it a sign of the times, a move toward social conservatism during a time when cultural sensitivities were at their peak? Perhaps a reflection of corporate responsibility? An attempt to protect advertisers from potentially angry listeners during a sensitive time?

A case could be made for all of these. But the most interesting way to look at the memorandum, perhaps, is in the context of Clear Channel itself, a company that suddenly came out of nowhere to become a dominant force in one of our two key broadcast mediums.

In many ways, Clear Channel Communications was the face of deregulation. And that’s why its memorandum, for many during that er, was so chilling. There was nothing quite like Clear Channel in the U.S. radio industry before that time, and it reflected a “new normal” of sorts.

With its roots in 1970s Texas, the company evolved from a small network of radio stations into a massive juggernaut of on-air seemingly overnight. And it was the federal government’s fault—a federal rule changes turned a network of fewer than 100 radio stations into one that had nearly 1,200 in the five years the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the days after the 9/11 attacks.

The law, which also gave us the infamous Communications Decency Act, was largely designed to deregulate ownership of many types of media, extending the amount of time that a single company could own a radio or television station before renewal, along with how many stations a single company could own in a market. And perhaps no company—TV or radio—leveraged this rule change more effectively than did Clear Channel, which spend much of the next decade after the law’s passage on an extended acquisition tear.

An example of a Clear Channel billboard. (Thomas Hawk/Flickr)

The conglomerate, named for a type of AM radio station whose signal is strong enough to avoid interference, aimed to build this level of scale in part to offer an impressive advertising portfolio to its clients. In some parts of the country, it could offer the resources of more than two dozen stations to potential advertisers, giving marketers an unparalleled level of targeting potential. And with its purchase of Eller Media Company in 1997, it suddenly became a major force in outdoor advertising, too.

Company officials like David Ross, the vice president of Clear Channel South Florida, noted in a 2001 South Florida Sun-Sentinel article that the company was well-positioned to offer advertisers every option under the sun.

“You can use a shotgun approach or a rifle approach to target an audience. We can give you a package that includes radio, promotions, billboards, taxi tops, bus shelters and mall media. You can try any combination and use what works best,” Ross stated.

Clear Channel was not alone—its largest competitor, Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, was then owned by Viacom, very much not a small player in media. While not quite as dominant as Clear Channel, it also had a significant billboard business.

But for radio listeners, the consolidation had the effect of making the medium much more boring and formulaic. With station programming generally dictated by a national corporation, concerns among musicians and listeners alike centered on a loss of choice and local culture. (A good comparison point here is what’s happening to the newspaper industry right now due to the toxic influence of private equity, although to a more drastic degree.)

“The radical deregulation of the radio industry allowed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has not benefited the public or musicians,” a 2002 report from the Future of Music Coalition stated. “Instead, it has led to less competition, fewer viewpoints, and less diversity in programming. Deregulation has damaged radio as a public resource.”

It’s in this climate that the September 11th attacks happened, and that Clear Channel’s response to those attacks was to send along a memo to radio programmers discouraging them from playing certain songs.

The memo wasn’t a hard line of censorship, but it reflected an emerging giant’s sudden reach.

(DonnaCR/Pixabay)

Was the Clear Channel memo an edict, a recommendation, or an edict dressed up as a recommendation?

When the list of 162 “lyrically questionable” songs first emerged less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, rumors started flying about the ulterior motives behind the list.

Did the company email it to program directors? Did the company force them to follow it? Were these rules or guidelines?

In a 2001 Slate article, Clear Channel Regional Senior VP of Programming Jack Evans characterized the list as one that programmers around the country created organically. To hear it from Evans, it was simply crowdsourced, though it was eventually emailed to stations around the country.

“After and during what was happening in New York and Washington and outside of Pittsburgh, some of our program directors began e-mailing each other about songs and questionable song titles,” he told the outlet, adding, “There were a substantial amount of songs in question that I’m glad the [program directors] brought up so we didn’t air them at a very, very sad time.”

The company had a high-level executive essentially confirming that the list existed in an on-record interview, and a long list of songs clearly emerged from somewhere. But as the story picked up steam in the media, Clear Channel suddenly tried to pour cold water on it. In a press release from September 18, 2001, the firm wrote:

Clear Channel Radio has not banned any songs from any of its radio stations.

Clear Channel believes that radio is a local medium. It is up to every radio station program director and general manager to understand their market, listen to their listeners and guide their station’s music selections according to local sensitivities. Each program director and general manager must take the pulse of his or her market to determine if play lists should be altered, and if so, for how long.

“In the wake of this terrible tragedy, the nation’s business community is responding with a degree of hypersensitivity,” explained Mark P. Mays, President and Chief Operating Officer of Clear Channel. “Even some movie companies have altered some of their release schedules in light of the mood in America today. Clear Channel strongly believes in the First Amendment and freedom of speech. We value and support the artist community. And we support our radio station programming staff and management team in their responsibility to respond to their local markets.”

This explanation was enough for Snopes, which labeled the idea of a ban “false” on its website that year and took the outlet at its word.

But Slate further noted that a radio-industry website characterized the list as an “internet rumor,” which suggests that some of Clear Channel’s critics took advantage of the situation to drum up a list designed to make the company look bad, which isn’t what happened.

In a follow-up article titled “Profiles in Ass Covering,” the outlet suggests that the press release appeared to be threading a needle:

If you read the press release carefully, it appears Clear Channel is weaseling out of sticky situation: “Clear Channel Radio has not banned any songs from any of its radio stations.” Right. They didn’t ban any songs, they simply asked that stations not play them.

And people with awareness of the industry noted that a soft edict from such a dominant company represented a hard edict in practice. As journalist Steven Wishnia wrote for the music magazine LIP in 2001: “Who in a job as highly coveted and easily replaceable as radio DJ is going to defy a ‘suggestion’ from on high about what is ‘inappropriate’? They don’t have to spell out Y-O-U W-I-L-L B-E F-I-R-E-D.”

In some ways, the situation is comparable to that of some of the more questionable corporate strategies we’ve seen during the COVID-19 crisis, where leaders brought up in an old-school way have tried to ignore the advice of public health officials out of an interest in not shaking up the traditional status quo. For example, the cable company Charter Communications resisted efforts to have employees work from home in part because of the apparent mindset of CEO Thomas Rutledge, who thinks employees “will just screw around at home,” as one anonymous employee put it to Gizmodo. Hundreds of the company’s employees have since gotten sick.

In a memo acquired by TechCrunch, Rutledge wrote, “While some back office and management functions can be performed remotely, they are more effective from the office.”

When someone finally puts the COVID-19 era into the history books, Rutledge’s call will likely be seen as an immense failure of leadership.

Certainly, Clear Channel was not in the exact same kind of situation, but in a lot of ways it reflects a similar sort of awkwardness between corporate culture and dramatic world events. What seems well-meaning inside of an internal email chain suddenly sounds a lot worse when it’s exposed to the outside world.

When a corporate culture suggests that you shouldn’t play Rage Against the Machine after a national tragedy, does the suggestion feel like something an employee can ignore? Or is it a threat of sorts? Because, in many ways, that’s what this whole saga comes down to.

Clear Channel, by sheer shape of corporate culture, set the expectation that a suggestion could be seen as an edict, so that’s how it was taken.