Fellow PR editor Jon posted today on the three-year anniversary of the defamation of the Dixie Chicks. Jon wonders, “if the Bush worshippers in the Nashville music establishment treat the unofficial king and queen of country the same way they treated the Dixie Chicks.”
Jon asks an excellent question, but there’s one problem: you go have to a lot further south than Nashville to find the guys who dropkicked the Chicks.
Leading the charge was Atlanta-based Cumulus Media — the second largest owner of radio stations in the country — which banned the Chicks, then held the first of many rallies across the country in Shreveport, La. (just across the Texas state line) in which bulldozers smashed Chicks CDs, posters, etc.
Jumping on the bandwagon and riding it from sea to sea was Clear Channel, mega mega owner of the airwaves, which held onto the issue — and the Dixie Chicks — with a death grip.
Clear Channel is also not based in Nashville, but in sunny San Antonio, which I should mention, is in Texas. SourceWatch.org has the 4-1-1 on Clear Channel.
“The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks… When Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, Mr. Hicks was chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, and Clear Channel’s chairman, Lowry Mays, was on its board. Under Mr. Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university’s endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998 Mr. Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire.”
“In addition, Hicks steered a controversial scheme to use the University of Texas’ $13 billion endowment for private investment. Among the beneficiaries were the Carlyle Group, the arms investment firm tied to both George Bush Snr and the bin Laden family, and George W Bush’s controversial Harken Oil drilling project in Bahrain.”
To Jon’s original question about possible fallout for Hill and McGraw, there are crucial differences here and now:
1. The Dixie Chicks are all women, not one of America’s favorite straight couples. No one’s going to think Faith and Tim posing nude on a magazine cover is an appropriate way of atoning for their sentiments. That only works on women.
2. Bush is at the nadir (so far) of his popularity, not at its height as he was in early 2003, when he was beating the drums of war in his campaign to lie his way into Iraq and when Maines made her comment. The campaign really took off after we bombed the hell out of Baghdad in what was probably an attempt to make supporting “shock and awe” seem patriotic. We’re over that now.
3. Hill and McGraw aren’t so much “criticizing” as they are defending. They are expressing compassion rather than making zingers.
4. The heavy-handed move by Big Radio was a mixed bag in terms of success. Both Clear Channel and Cumulus were called before a Senate committee investigating the pros and cons of media consolidation.
Cumulus Media’s Lewis Dickey realizes his company did itself no favors in Washington when it banished the Dixie Chicks from country playlists. “If we had to do it over again, we would do things differently to avoid this,” he admitted after incensed lawmakers called the incident a big warning about the potential dangers of consolidation.
“You have given me reason to have tremendous pause about consolidation,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), likening the company’s behavior to Communist and Nazi tactics in controlling opinions their citizens hear. “You’ve hurt yourself in terms of what you want…”
“It’s a strong argument about what concentration has the power to do,” said committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.)…Decisions to ban the Chicks would have been less alarming, he said, if made on a station-by-station basis by local program directors.
Dickey seemed taken aback by criticism of the corporatewide decision in March to ban the group from Cumulus’s country stations…
But Dixie Chicks manager Simon Renshaw said the impact went well beyond bumping the group from the airwaves. He accused Cumulus of acquiescing to CD-destroying rallies sponsored by company DJs and fostering an atmosphere that led to death threats against group members. “There was an organized campaign to vilify the group.”
I think we all know who’s rightly to be vilified now and he doesn’t have a hit song, although he did play a guitar in Louisiana once.
Another example of “ROVEPUTIN” vengeance in his push to crown the NAKED IMP AS KING OF NEOFASCIST AMERICA!If their “GOD” is anything like “JUST” in HIS judgements, Rove will spend eternity in THEIR HELL, listening to Dubya play the guitar!