This is the historical stock prices of CCU (a Texas based company) - the history of Clear Channel Communcations reached an all time high in stock prices in the year 2000. But the most interesting aspect of the influence of Bush's FCC is the return of dividends to stockholders after this company became the Bush/Cheney/Powell darling.
The fines by the FCC of CBS was simple vicious by Powell to leverage over CBS and any other media service when he realized 'granting favors' didn't necessarily mean having control.
...The flash of flesh had been so fleeting that many viewers weren't sure of what they had seen until it was confirmed by newspaper, radio and Internet accounts the next day. Others wanted to get a second look. This half-time show instantly became the most-replayed television segment ever on the millions of TiVo digital video recorders.
At the Federal Communications Commission, then-Chairman Michael Powell was outraged. (click here) The following morning he got on the phone with Mel Karmazin, then the chief operating officer at CBS. Powell expected better of what was once dubbed the nation's "Tiffany Network."
Ten days earlier, after the expenditure of considerable effort and energy on the part of Powell, Viacom (CBS's corporate parent at the time) had been freed from having to divest ownership of several local broadcast stations thanks to legislation allowing networks to own stations constituting up to 39 percent of the country's television viewership. The provision had been attached to a budget bill signed by President Bush.
"CBS deeply regrets the incident that occurred during the Super Bowl halftime show," Karmazin said in a statement. "We attended all rehearsals throughout the week, and there was no indication that any such thing would happen." Yet happen it did, and spokespeople for CBS, for MTV, for Jackson and for Timberlake spent the next several days blaming each other for what did happen.
A presidential election has come and gone, and there is a new chairman at the FCC and new top officials at CBS. Thanks to the Timberlake-Jackson incident, indecency fines were raised 10-fold in a law Bush signed in June 2006. Also, CBS has been split off from MTV, which remains part of Viacom Inc., now a separate company from the broadcaster....
"Clear Channel (click here) will do anything they can, threaten me, go to my clients directly, anything to get control of the markets. . . . They're a clear example of what can happen with deregulation. They've ruined radio, as far as I'm concerned. And now they're licking their chops to be able to control more of what the public sees and hears." – An anonymous ad agency owner, Salon.com, Feb. 19, 2003 (click here)
...There is a chain of human sympathy against suffering in the world which goes something like this: If a steamroller were headed straight for a Labrador retriever, a human baby, a member of the Swedish bikini team, Karl Rove, and an iguana, and you could save all but one of these people/creatures, which would you sentence to a future as an organic pancake? It’s a tough call, of course, but all an iguana eats is leafy vegetables, whereas Karl Rove will steal your soul and send your children to die in Iraq. (Besides, he wasn’t very interested in saving much of anything when Katrina steamrolled the Gulf Coast.)...(click here)
The image making of Karl Rove is infamous. It entailed daily dispatches from the President's assistant to media, the infrastructure of the Bush Administration and personal visits to nearly anyplace within the government structure to control the Bush image, expand the influence of media in promoting Republican candidates thoughout the country and simply be a burden to any 'entity' that wasn't a political party asset. Karl Rove was a power broker. He was given free rein to do as he pleased with the infrastructure of the USA government and his 'image agenda' was facilitated by more power brokering by Michael Powell at the FCC.
Rove's goal was/is to great a Republican haven from sea to shining sea and Powell's was to facilitate that reality no matter what it took.
That is abuse of government. Abuse of power. However one wants to put it. Bush and Cheney allowed 'tinkering' within the infrastructure of the USA government to promote the Republican Party without consideration of laws or understood proprieties by the American people. This administration threw ethics out the door and sought to override any decency of moral conduct not legislated. In other words, where laws didn't exist because it was unconscionable to venture into improprietized power brokering, this administration did it freely, with complete conscious and with the permission of their Christian Right extremists to make the USA their privatized nation and holy glory wagon.
Any level of government relies on the moral character of elected officials to carry out business of government. It is impossible to legislate ever aspect of behavior of any official. Due to that fact administrations that are moralless, as the Bush administration is, can be harnessed for 'free will' authority to dismantle the USA Constitution. The checks and balance built into the Constitution is supposed to stop it's own demise at the hand of corruption.
