Remember the film remake of Dragnet with Dan Aykroyd as Joe Friday? The plot engine was a preacher who crusaded against pornography and sundry vice while backhandedly purveying it as an increasingly rare and thus highly profitable sideline. The current fracas over questionable content spilling from the mass media in the legislative, corporate and bureaucratic institutions that control our communications infrastructure seems to strongly resemble this sort of metaphorical snake-eating-its-tail scheme. Although the very charter of the Federal Communications Commission forbids it from interfering in programming decisions by its licensees, a prohibition routinely ignored for 70 years, communications giants from the beginning have welcomed its occasional stings. I remember provoking ant nests when I was a kid, too.
I take my conspiracy theories with the requisite spoonful of salt. Yet it seems to any well-versed student of cause and effect that this whole narrative has been a carefully staged playout of larger forces with clear motives for shifting the sphere of public opinion tectonics. We lined up in droves a few years back to revel in the $60 million taxpayer-funded blockbuster about a certain commander-in-chief's pecadillos. That will turn out to be a lame coming attraction trailer compared to what we are witnessing today. All that's changed, seemingly, is who gets to finance this spectacle. The public still gets to chip in, of course, but now that the paradigm has been established, like government sponsored pharmaceutical research, corporate entities will collect the surplus.
Consider this. Twenty-five years ago Clear Channel Media was just another flash in the pan, a San Antonio based regional holding company. Their only presence in my town was the license of a moribund Top 40 AM, which they quickly unloaded on a Chicago group who eventually sent it into several months of darkness before it found new life as a puppet of its Spanish FM. Such was the nature of the beast, when companies could hold no more than 14 licenses anywhere in the country. I won't argue that media consolidation hasn't brought some stability to a nearly insane way to make a living: giving away your product. But it seems now we have resorted to the opposite extreme, transforming the focus of every outlet way from listener/viewer to buyer. The real audience of any for-profit medium is its advertiser. We simply don't bother disguising that fact anymore. Even Clear Channel's CEO came clean in 2003 when he declared without irony that his company's only product was its vast audiences. That world view has reaped huge rewards. In an economy still in the grip of stagnation, Clear Channel's bottom line grew six percent last year, with net earnings of $1.15 billion.
Congress has just proposed raising fines the FCC can levy, again in violation of its own charter, by nearly 20 fold. A $500 thousand fine for, say, reading Ken Starr's report on the air, sounds hefty, until it dares hold a candle to Clear Channel's swelling coffers and its 100 fold increase in license holdings since the 1980s. Now that the tide of the Jackson combine's antics is receding from its high water mark, leaving a sort of residue of thin slime and bleached pallor on the body politic, it is strangely Clear Channel, not CBS and MTV owner Viacom, deigning obeisance to the federal regulators. Howard Stern is banished, from all one half of one percent of its stations, earning large headlines. Bubba the Love Sponge, presumably one of the modes of audience delivery Clear Channel was once prideful of, was given the gate, too, though not for the choice of his on-air moniker. Guys, make the acquaintance of the Dixie Chicks, last season's whipping girls for all that ailed us. Patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. Like Christopher Plummer's character showed us so well in Dragnet, feigned chastity will shelter any pack of rascals much faster.
Here's the larger picture. 2003 was the climax of at least a 15-year effort to turn ourselves against our own better interest. My interest in radio arcana now compels me to drag my own pet conspiracy theory out of the closet. In the mid-80s several technical firms competed to establish the industry standard for AM stereo (yes, there really is such a thing). Unlike the earlier advent of FM stereo, however, FCC Chair Dennis Patrick, in keeping with the prevailing theme of Reagan era laissez-faire, decided that the marketplace, not the government, should be the ultimate arbiter of which AM stereo system would prevail. Neither broadcasters nor receiver manufacturers were about to bet a significant chunk of capital on one of multiple legal methods for sending and decoding, only to find later they'd backed the wrong horse. This was the time of VHS overpowering the superior Beta, and IBM doing likewise to Macintosh, after all. There was no sure compass to go by. So AM stereo died on the vine. I find it curiously coincidental that at nearly the same instant, Rush Limbic and others like him began turning the AM band into the shallow pool of hypocritical populism it is today. And it is even less of a coinicidence that Clear Channel engineers, handed the transmitter room keys to newly acquired licenses, are uniformly ordered to remove any AM stereo apparatus the previous owners may have been foolish enough to even bother introducing to electricity.