The pedmount disaster

CLEAR CHANNEL, the Texas conglomerate that already controls an inordinate amount of the media in San Francisco, just made its first big inroad into controlling the distribution of newspapers – and almost nobody in town raised a peep of protest.

The giant media company runs seven San Francisco radio stations (and some 1,200 nationwide). It controls almost half the city's billboards. It has exclusive rights to promote concerts at the Fillmore and the Shoreline Amphitheater. It places ads on top of taxis and at malls (see "Clear and Present Danger," 4/2/02).

And on May 6 Clear Channel installed the first of what could be a large number of pedestal-mounted news racks that are set to replace the freestanding racks that are the main distribution system for a wide range of local newspapers, including the Bay Guardian. Under a city contract that should never have been approved, Clear Channel will build pedmounts, sell ads on the back, keep all of the profits (and never tell the city how much those profits are) – and threaten the health of a vibrant community-based press in this city.

Among other things, the pedmounts prevent newspapers from choosing their own distribution points (papers that depend on street traffic can't put their boxes in locations where their readers are most likely to congregate). The fixed number of pedmount slots limit the number of publications that can be displayed – and make it extremely difficult for new free-distribution papers to start up in the city. And they force newspapers to accept Clear Channels ads on the back of their distribution points.

Clear Channel, let's not forget, is notorious for its right-wing political agenda and its history of censoring other points of view. The company devastated San Francisco's popular KMEL-FM (see "How Clear Channel Wrecked KMEL," 1/22/03). It censored music even remotely critical of the Bush administration after 9/11 and recently kicked DJ Howard Stern off six of its stations (after Stern began attacking Bush and the Federal Communications Commission).

Every newspaper in town should have been howling in protest when the first pedmount went up; instead the press greeted the installation with indifference at best, and at worst (in the case of the San Francisco Examiner) a near celebratory tone. That's shortsighted – many of the newspapers that accepted a legal settlement and went along with this deal will soon regret it.