RIGHT OF THE DIAL
The history of Clear Channel Communications and its rise to dominance.
By ALEC FOEGE
Reviewed by JACQUES STEINBERG, New York Times SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
Published: April 13, 2008

To those listeners who long for the days when their favorite radio station was independent, eclectic in its programming and as responsive as a tripwire to breaking local news, Clear Channel is nothing less than the Evil Empire. In Internet chat rooms where the media giant's acquisitions and cost slashing have been tallied as if on a scoreboard - it grew from 43 stations to more than 1,200 from 1995 to 2001 alone - its name is regularly followed by the same expletive typically directed at the Yankees during a game at Fenway Park.

But when Alec Foege, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Spin and Playboy, set out to write the definitive history of a company that possesses more radio stations than any other, he decided to give it the benefit of the doubt.

"I was not out to do a hatchet job," he writes in the preface to Right of the Dial, "but rather to get to the bottom of a company that I suspected had gotten a raw deal as its bad publicity had snowballed."

The reader need wait only three paragraphs before Foege renders his final verdict: "Having spent a lot of time talking to some of the company's most prominent critics, as well as some of its most devout supporters, I have concluded that Clear Channel is indeed to blame for much of what it has been accused of."

FOR REMAINDER OF REVIEW:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04.....bua2&oref=slogin