Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/16/craigslist-not-to-blame.html
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I guess that’ll open all those public airwaves for pirate radio stations now, right?
Heh. Someone will pick up the licenses and do a few cycles of rinse-repeat.
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Late stage Capitalism? Late enough? Not late enough? Too late?
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Deregulate all the things!
And then, when all the things are deregulated, arm them.
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I guess Rushy will be getting a pay cut - if not a cut from the airwaves. He didn’t make the ratings numbers they were looking for to ask for that ad money.
Well, the world needs ditch diggers too.
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Soooo… Who are these guys getting these tremendous loans from, and how do they not see the obvious pattern of “Bain Capital will destroy all value in this company, dramatically lowering the chance we will get paid back”?
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As long as they all get their cut before it implodes - they’re fine with that. Let the suckers bail the banks out again.
rinse and repeat
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Probably your 401k.
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How amazing would it be if those radio stations were bought up one at a time by locals looking to return some originality and quality to the airwaves?
In the real world some other corporation (Disney?) is going to buy them up and return to the same corporate wasteland model that Clearchannel perfected 20 years ago.
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They all think they’re too smart to get caught holding the hot potato when the music stops.
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As much as I hate the idea of fat-cat billionaires getting rich off of the corpse of it, as someone who once ran an anti-ClearChannel benefit concert, I’m glad to see them wither and die.
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Bain’s gonna Bain.
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how is it that this bullshit is not illegal?
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Meanwhile listener-sponsored self sustaining Pacifica stations (save for WBAI) are thriving.
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How about religious radio taking over? That’s what seemed to have happened after all the normal stations abandoned the AM band. In fact it seems like broadcast TV is getting taken over in the same way.
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Part of the value extraction that Bain Capital does is they borrow the money for buying a company from themselves , which gives them the interest from the loan. Once the company is bought, they transfer the debt of the loan to the company. So they are getting the interest and originating fees from a $10B loan, and ClearChannel has the debt.
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Because of Bill Clinton’s telecommunications act of 1996.
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I may have missed something, but the last time I checked, it wasn’t neo-librels who advocate de-regulation; it’s “everything de-regulated” neo-conservatives. Regulations for the most part are protections against these kinds mergers. Think big banks - too big to fail, and what a mess that turned out to be.
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