"[Foege] is particularly adept at translating the medium's culture and technology for a lay audience . . . to those who care deeply about what has been lost, culturally, as Clear Channel has taken command of the public airwaves these last four decades, Foege's effort is a noble one. And the story he tells is as important as it is unnerving."—Jacques Steinberg, The New York Times

"Clear Channel may not have ruined American radio on its own, but it came pretty close. Alec Foege's Right of the Dial details the whole, sad media saga."—Eric Boehlert, senior fellow at Media Matters for America and author of Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over for Bush

"Read this book and you will want to scream. Alec Foege tells a tale of rapacity and financial engineering that could drive one to socialism. Not really, but close. In the hands of the Mays family, Clear Channel Communications became America’s radio behemoth. With its 2,000 radio stations, it devised ways to economize and centrally automate the music the stations played [and] the news it presented. For a time, it was good for investors, and for the Mays family. But as this book lucidly demonstrates, it was bad for citizens and bad for American culture."—Ken Auletta

"The story of Clear Channel's binge and purge says so much about media in our time. Alec Foege tells that complex story with characteristic insight and balance. He never settles for the easy take, only for the truth, which he illuminates with impressive clarity."—Anthony DeCurtis, Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone

"The Clear Channel corporation has been one of the most successful, most controversial, and most reviled companies in the history of the music business. With Right of the Dial, Alec Foege takes a thorough, clear-eyed look inside this mythic beast, and reveals a uniquely American saga of commerce and culture gone mad."—Alan Light, former editor-in-chief, Vibe and Spin magazines

"Despite the title, Foege doesn't pay much attention to the proposition, loudly voiced by its many critics, that Clear Channel is a vocal ally of the right wing, broadcasting Rush Limbaugh and contributing big bucks to the GOP. He focuses more on dissecting the company's role over the past two decades in massively consolidating America's crazy-quilt network of local radio stations and analyzing what that has meant for the industry and the United States as a whole. The Texas-based corporation was started by Lowry Mays, a folksy San Antonio businessman who invested in a failing country-music FM station in 1972, when 90 percent of the country still listened to AM. Buoyed by the deal-making passion of Mays and sons Mark and Randall, as well as the shortsighted deregulatory fervor and merger mania of the '80s and '90s, the company began buying up stations at an increasingly accelerated pace . . . None of this was done with an interest in anything but the bottom line. The company cared not a whit about improving the product, Foege makes clear."—Kirkus Reviews

"Foege kept hearing the same Led Zeppelin song over and over. Here, he suggests that Clear Channel Communications is largely to blame for this ubiquitous cookie-cutter radio programming, tracing the company's history and showing how its conservative business practices and values have affected American culture . . . Through sound research and interviews with industry experts and Clear Channel employees (though [Lowry] Mays, his sons, and other top executives refused to grant interviews), Foege finds that Mays's goal was primarily to make money. He had no experience or training in radio or music, no interest in radio's inherent value as a communication tool, and was more concerned with his advertisers than with the listening public. Foege concludes that radio broadcasting has been commodified into a one-size-fits-all product. On the whole, this work is an interesting blend of corporate history and social commentary."—Donna Marie Smith, Library Journal

"Foege brings objectivity and insight to this exploration of Clear Channel, one of the most reviled media conglomerates in the U.S. The author aims for an unbiased understanding of the corporation and its practices, how it came to be and what it says about our culture. The reader follows the Clear Channel operation from its inception as a family business in the 1990s through commercial expansion, megamergers, vertical integration, antitrust lawsuits and the eventual sale of a third of its holdings. Foege cobbles together an oral history of the company, painting Clear Channel executives as businessmen first and foremost. To them, payola (accepting financial gifts in exchange for airplay) and voice tracking (phoning in 'local' broadcasts from a centralized location) just made sense for the bottom line. The result has been the homogenization of radio—a phenomenon that has produced one, single, all-too-familiar classic rock station . . . Foege's history is at its best while unpacking this confrontation of American values between art and commerce."—Publishers Weekly