Media Farm can’t cover everything, or let our readers know each time our DigBoston baloney radar starts a-clanging. We just don’t have enough resources, and all the research grants go to the country’s umpteen million centers for investigative journalism, presumably so the professors can all cover their extensive conference and travel expenses.
But while we even miss lots of important stuff – evil mergers, new technologies, longtime institutions filing for bankruptcy – we’re never too busy to step on Clear Channel, America’s largest broadcast radio company, which changed its name to iHeartMedia last week. Sorry to spell it out, but this is of course a euphemistic maneuver of Olympic proportions, if not an insult to every intelligent life form that has ever tuned a dial. We could spend forever listing the unfortunate ironies and cheap tries at cultural relevance in play; for starters, no one but the stockholders loves anything about this hideous behemoth, while their service is to media what The Donald is to Oxford. Our priority, though, is to impale mainstream outlets that saw fit to cover the name change as if Clear Channel isn’t a deplorable monster that has cheapened the entire broadcast industry.
First some ridiculous and downright awful headlines:
- Bloomberg Businessweek: “Clear Channel Looks for Digital Love With a New Name: [sic] IHeartMedia”
- Mashable: “End of an Era: Clear Channel Rebrands as iHeartMedia”
- Consumerist (under a section called, and we hate having to even write this, “Totes Kewl”): “Clear Channel Announces At Slumber Party That Everyone Has To Call It iHeartMedia Now”
While there are any number of depraved examples, the praise heaped upon the ingenious moniker switch by CNET serves as an especially hack display of the schlock passing for coverage of this topic. Not a single quote from anyone who loathes Clear Channel. Just big words from the top dog …
It’s not a company with a bunch of old radio stations and outdoor [billboards] anymore,” Chief Executive Bob Pittman said in an interview. “We’ve transformed, so let’s now take a name that matters.”
Most embarrassing of all was the New York Times, which took the gushing a step further, even using the opportunity to advertise the company’s recent soiree …
As Clear Channel’s all-purpose audio brand, the iHeartRadio brand is attached to a new awards show and multiple live events around the country. Those events include the annual iHeartRadio Music Festival, which returns to Las Vegas for a fourth time on Friday and Saturday with performances by Taylor Swift, Coldplay, One Direction, Iggy Azalea and many other pop acts eager to curry favor with the country’s most powerful broadcaster.
You done being brainwashed? Good. Because there are only four things you have to remember:
- Once upon a time there was a monolith called Clear Channel …
- They gobbled up your favorite stations and replaced them all with syndicated bro country and other disgraces …
- They also made billions off of billboards and in various other annoying and dispiriting ways …
- Then they changed their name to iHeartMedia, and everyone lived stupidly ever after.
The End.
[Media Farm is wrangled weekly by DigBoston News + Features Editor Chris Faraone]
