John — Signals From Nowhere
Topic(s): Media | Comments Off on John — Signals From NowhereFrom the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22WWLN.html
June 22, 2003
Signals From Nowhere
By WALTER KIRN
used to take a long road trip every year or two, usually in the middle of the summer, with no fixed schedule or specific destination, just a vague intention to try new foods and admire the changing scenery. And though I always took along an atlas, I rarely used it. I navigated by radio.
You used to be able to do that in America: chart your course by the accents, news and songs streaming in from the nearest AM transmitter. A drawling update on midday cattle prices meant I was in Wyoming or Nebraska. A guttural rant about city-hall corruption told me I’d reach Chicago within the hour. A soaring, rhythmic sermon on fornication — Welcome to Alabama. The music, too. Texas swing in the Southwest oil country. Polka in North Dakota. Nonstop Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs. What’s more, the invisible people who introduced the songs gave the impression that they listened to them at home. They were locals, with local tastes.
I felt like a modern Walt Whitman on those drives. When I turned on the radio, I heard America singing, even in the dumb banter of ”morning zoo” hosts. But then last summer, rolling down a highway somewhere between Montana and Wisconsin, something new happened. I lost my way, and the radio couldn’t help me find it. I twirled the dial, but the music and the announcers all sounded alike, drained, disconnected from geography, reshuffling the same pop playlists and canned bad jokes.
What a miserable trip. I heard America droning.
Recently, I found out whom to blame: a company called Clear Channel Communications. The mammoth buyer and consolidator of hundreds of independent local radio stations — along with its smaller competitors, Infinity Broadcasting and Cumulus Media — is body-snatching America’s sonic soul, turning Whitman’s vivacious democratic cacophony into a monotonous numbing hum.
No matter where a person lives these days (particularly in Minot, N.D., where Clear Channel runs all six commercial stations in town), he’s probably within range of an affiliate, if not three or four, since the company buys in bulk: pop stations, rock stations, talk stations, the works. Worse, quite a few of these stations don’t really exist — not in the old sense. They’re automated pods, downloading their programming from satellites linked to centralized, far-off studios where announcers who have never even set foot in Tucson, Little Rock, Akron or Boston — take your pick — rattle off promos and wisecracks by the hundreds, then flip a switch and beam them to your town as if they’re addressing its residents personally, which they aren’t. They don’t even know the weather there.
What results is a transcontinental shower of sound that seems to issue from heaven itself, like the edicts of the Wizard of Oz. In a way that other media companies can only dream of (though a controversial recent F.C.C. rule change permitting concentrated corporate ownership of television stations may eventually make these dreams true), Clear Channel controls its portion of the airwaves as thoroughly as Britannia once ruled the oceans. Even the F.C.C. has faced this fact, which may be why, of all the broadcast media it is allowing to clump together for market share, it made one pointed exception: radio. Clear Channel holds no monopoly by any means — its nearly 1,250 stations represent only 10 percent or so of the national total — but considering that the company was founded only in 1996, its growth rate is astonishing. If given another 10 years to spread unchecked, Clear Channel might cover the dial from end to end, not just in some cities, but coast to coast. America would be one big Minot then, with literally nowhere to turn except Clear Channel.
This prospect might not be so troubling if radio weren’t the most intensely intimate of all electronic media, forging a bond between broadcaster and listener that feels, even though it’s not real, like true companionship. Though TV news anchors like to fancy themselves as guests in their audience’s living rooms, they sit behind an impenetrable wall of glass that no amount of feigned eye contact can overcome. Between TV and TV land there’s always a fence, but radio creates a different landscape — open, inclusive, neighborly. When a D.J. asks a trivia question and promises concert tickets to the fifth caller who answers correctly, my urge to pick up the phone is instantaneous, as is my urge to wait to hear who won, in case I know him, and very often I do. This sense of connection is fragile, though. Bounce it off an orbiting satellite, cut it with generic pretaped humor bits, then filter it through some distant corporate headquarters, and radioland will be a land of strangers.
Clear Channel’s critics — who multiply each day, it seems — tend to come from the political left. Their big beef is the network’s supposed conservative bias, which, for attentive regular listeners, isn’t supposition at all. The powerful syndicator of Rush Limbaugh and numerous other popular right-wing talk-jocks is truer and bluer than Oliver North’s flag pin. But for me, that’s a minor grievance, mere partisan grumbling. It’s the creeping paralysis of our national vocal cords and the gradual atrophying of our eardrums that bothers me and would surely have bothered Whitman. That’s why I’ll probably skip this summer’s road trip: I fear that I’ll drive my car into a ditch. Radio from nowhere produced by nobodies eventually makes you nod off at the wheel.
Walter Kirn is the author, most recently, of ”Up in the Air,” a novel.