Clear Channel's Tyranny of the Public Airwaves in San Francisco, killing Green960

Clear Channel exercises its freedom of speech by denying the public any alternative to the right wing hate speech that dominates AM talk radio.

Evidently Clear Channel is part of the Republican political strategy for the 2012 election, trying their best to suppress the liberal vote in California.

Stephanie Miller's show had turned into a nonstop ad for her stupidly named 'sexy liberal' comedy roadshow, and Thom Hartmann was obsessively compulsively tilting quixotically at one conservatard after another in his twisted quest for Socratic dialog with the certifiably insane, yet to replace these stalwarts with of all people the psychotic demagogue Glenn Beck??? It is truly an insult to the entire Bay Area that must warm the cockles of Rupert Murdoch's cold dead heart.

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http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8974

Clear Channel, our public airwaves and public interest obligations




Emmy award-winning former Los Angeles TV news producer Sue Wilson (an occasional guest contributor on media issues at The BRAD BLOG over the years), whose documentary film Broadcast Blues focuses on, among other things, the dangers of Clear Channel's dominance in the radio market following the passage of the Telecommunications Act, noted yet another change by the company over the weekend. In Sacramento, the state capitol in very progressive California, where there has been no progressive AM talk stations on the public airwaves for years, more Rightwing radio was quietly added to the airwaves.



She charges, on a Facebook page linked from her FCC watchdog website, OurPublicAirwaves.com, that last Wednesday, the company "pulled a fast one on its listeners in Sacramento" by replacing an FM rock station with simulcast programming from talk station KFBK, the station which launched, and still carries, Rightwing talker Rush Limbaugh.



Wilson writes that the move "means that hard right-wing talk will fill another 50,000 watts of OUR PUBLIC AIRWAVES in the Sacramento region, ranging from Lake Tahoe to Santa Rosa. It means our region now gets four stations promoting pro-corporate 'conservative' hate speech, but zero stations promoting any opposing ideas."



She says this means that "Limbaugh can tell millions that Occupy Wall Street protestors are 'Pure, genuine parasites,' and 'smug, stupid idiots' whose parents will need to 'housebreak 'em all over again'" while Sean Hannity "defends UC Davis cops use of pepper spray [and] can tell millions that Occupy protesters are 'Lunatics Of The Left Wing'", while at the same time on KFBK's sister station KSTE Rightwinger Michael Savage "calls occupiers 'vermin'".



"[There is n]obody there to counter this propaganda," she charges. "'Conservative' talk radio supporters will tell us that this is all about free speech, and if we don't like it, we should just change the channel."



"They are right," Wilson says, "it is about free speech. OUR free speech. Where is OUR opportunity to get an alternative message out to our community on OUR PUBLIC AIRWAVES?"



She goes on to say that no matter the politics, stations are granted FCC licenses for use of the public airwaves in exchange only for serving in the public interest.



"How is a hard right corporate power grab serving YOUR public interest?," she rhetorically asks. "Answer: It is not."



Politics aside?



In 2008, Bain Capital LLC, a Boston-based private equity firm founded in 1984 by current Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, purchased the Clear Channel conglomerate in a leveraged buyout.



Clear Channel's removal of progressive talk from San Francisco's airwaves at the beginning of a Presidential election year when Romney is seen by many to be the GOP's likely nominee is bound to raise eyebrows and renew progressive concerns about media consolidation under the 1996 Telecom Act.



Collins, however, doesn't see a conspiracy behind the shakeup in San Francisco. "I just don't think the decisions were about politics," he says. "But, it's very easy to see that there's an industry bias against Liberals and a basic industry presumption that Liberals can't be successful in talk radio."



"The real failure of this was to promote progressive talk in the same manner as conservative talk is promoted," he says.



Indeed, it's not just the corporate radio industry that seems disinclined toward supporting and promoting progressive programming. In 2006, Collins released a memo from ABC Radio Networks instructing affiliates who carried programs syndicated by Air America (the progressive radio network which declared bankruptcy the same year) to black out all ads from some 90 major corporate sponsors, including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Visa, Exxon Mobil, Cingular, McDonald's, and even the U.S. Postal service and the U.S. Navy. All of them, the memo reads, "do not wish to air on any Air America affiliates