ABSTRACT
For many critics of deregulation and ownership concentration, industry giant Clear Channel Communications, owner of over 1,000 radio stations in the United States, epitomizes all that is wrong with commercial radio today. Clear Channel’s radio empire (whether evil or not) was made possible by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which significantly deregulated the commercial radio industry. The Telecom Act, as it is commonly known, formalized a “shift in the definition of pub-
lic interest from something determined by regulators to something determined by the marketplace” (Bates & Chambers, 1999, p. 23). The rapid ownership concentration that accompanied this shift has fueled concerns-even among proderegulation conservatives-about the homogenization of programming on commercial radio stations and calls for reregulation of the radio industry.
