The messy suicide of commercial radio series; (part 2) Regulations? We don’t need stinking regulations

Starting in the Reagan administration, regulations that had held media ownership in check for five decades began to get stripped away. By the mid-1990s any company could own pretty near all the media outlets it could afford.

One of the planks on the platform that brought Ronald Reagan to office was getting as much government as possible out of people’s lives and businesses. One of the first major policy initiatives to reach fruition, in 1981, was the official beginning of the deregulation of media. Gone were some of the more stringent rules of ownership and cross ownership. Rather than have the government dictate the rules, the FCC had decided to let the market govern. According to an FCC report, “Given the status of broadcasting today, the marketplace and competitive forces are more likely to obtain these public interest objectives than are regulatory guidelines.”

Some of the rules that went by the board in the shakeup included:

• Radio stations no longer had to keep detailed program logs – though, as we’ll see later, that didn’t really matter, as radio stations were beginning to be programmed effectively from the logs.

• There was no longer any limit on the amount of advertising a station could air, whereas previously the limit was 18 minutes (30 percent) per hour. If a station thought it could maintain listeners broadcasting nothing but commercials, nothing could stop it from doing so.

• The regulations requiring a certain amount of local interest news and “public service” programming – a prime means for challenging licenses – no longer applied.

• The broadcast ownership rules became far more relaxed.

By 1984, the number of radio stations any one entity could own had nearly doubled, from seven FM and seven AM stations (limits set in the mid-1950s) to 12 FM and 12 AM stations. The numbers had risen to 20 each by 1994. (However, owners were still limited to one station per band in any one market.) The courts got into the act, for example overturning the “fairness doctrine,” requiring stations to give equal time to opposing viewpoints, in 1987.

The trend came to a head with the Telecommunications Act, which Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996. Suddenly, it became open season on radio stations. The national cap on the number of stations a company could own disappeared altogether.

In a market with:	A single entity can control:
45 or more stations	up to 8 stations, no more than 5 in the same band
30 – 44 stations	up to 7 stations, no more than 4 in the same band
15 – 29 stations	up to 6 stations, no more than 4 in the same band
14 or fewer stations	up to 5 stations, no more than 3 in the same band

The floodgates opened. In particular, radio and entertainment impresario Robert Sillerman began buying stations as if they were Monopoly properties. Said Sillerman:

The recent passage of the Telecommunications Act, in substantially the form which we anticipated… opens up significant opportunities for us, not only in our existing markets but in other areas throughout the country. In Greenville-Spartanburg, we will be operating a triopoly, three FM stations and one AM station, and in Jackson we will have three FMs and two AMs. This high level of radio station ownership within a market has never before been possible and we anticipate much greater operating efficiencies and excellent results as a benefit of deregulation.