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...of our commercial landscapes is on balance a good thing. Morn & Pop's Hardware may be charming, Postrel contended, but with the exception of Mom and Pop themselves, most of us will be better off if there's a Home Depot in town.
But what about the homogenization of our cultural and informational landscape? That, it turns out, is a different story, a part of which Alec Foege attempts to tell in Right of the Dial: The Rise ol: Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio. Though today Clear Channel has fallen from the heights it reached just a few years ago, if you have any opinion about the company at all it is probably not a good one. As it ballooned in size to become the dominant player in the radio industry, Clear Channel came to symbolize for many people everything that's wrong with media today: a rapacious corporation, unleashed by its Republican friends to pillage its way across the American landscape, leaving in its wake hundreds of formerly unique and public-minded outlets, which were suddenly sucked into the corporate maw and spit back on a powerless public, delivering the same soulless excuse for news and culture to every community unlucky enough to suffer under its pitiless rule. Or so the story goes.
Clear Channel began in 1972 when its founder, L. Lowry Mays, cosigned a loan for some associates who wanted to buy an FM radio station in San Antonio. When they ran into financial difficulties, Mays found himself the owner of the station. When Mays and a group of investors bought an AM station three years...
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