Dead Air

"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.'"

In The New York Times, Jacques Steinberg reviews Alec Foege's Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio.