As I’ve written,
the demise of newsmedia can’t be blamed on tech – rather, it was the
combination of technology and deregulated, neoliberal capitalism, which
saw media companies merged and acquired, vertically and horizontally
integrated, with quality lowered, staff outsourced and assets stripped,
leaving them vulnerable to technological shocks, after all their
in-house experts were turned into contractors who drifted away, their
physical plant sold and leased back, their war-chests drained by vulture
capitalists who loaded them up with debt that acted like a millstone
around their necks as they strove to maneuver their way out of their
economic conundrum.
It would be hard to ask for a better example of this phenomenon than
Clearchannel (now called “Iheartradio,” though not for long).
For decades, Clearchannel was the bogeyman of people who cared about
media consolidation, a company that rapaciously acquired and then
downgraded radio stations up and down the dial and from coast to coast.
That was only possible because of loose markets and loose regulation,
the seismic shift in antitrust enforcement, allowing all our media eggs to be stuck into one gigantic, unwieldy basket.
Enter Bain Capital. Once Clearchannel was at its unwieldy zenith, loaded
with $8B of debt from all these acquisition, Bain Capital and Thomas H
Lee acquired the company with an additional $10B in debt that it dumped
on its balance-sheets (paying themselves handsomely!), and then
proceeded to run the company into the ground, weighing it down with
another $2B worth of debt.
Now Clearchannel/Iheartradio is about to die. Having been stripped of
nearly all its assets, having sold off all those once-diverse,
once-thriving community radio stations to yet another set of private
equity vultures, they’re about to join the likes of Sears, Sears Canada, Toys R Us
and other former giants whose demise has been handily blamed on Big
Tech, without any scrutiny given to the shadowy, banal billionaires who
asset-stripped them, debt-loaded them, and ran them into the ground.
