Clear Channel Communications has long been a Great Satan to critics of the media conglomeration touched off by Reagan-era broadcasting deregulation. How odd, then, that we’ve had to wait this long for a book-length study of the biggest of Big Radio companies. CCC is a monster that—until the iPod and the Internet went upside its ugly head—seemed bent on hegemonic control of American popular music through its “synergistic” stranglehold on radio stations, concert venues and concert-promotion businesses from coast to coast.

Unfortunately, this pioneering study of the now-declining radio giant is an indifferent piece of muckraking. Mind you, freelance journalist Foege doesn’t exactly identify as a muckraker. Rather, he asserts in his preface that his intent was to “get to the bottom of a company that I suspected had gotten a raw deal as its bad publicity had snowballed.” (Caveat to sensitive readers: That brutal trifecta of clichés compressed into a mere 21 words says all that needs to be said about Foege the prose stylist.)

Still, Foege ultimately concludes that CCC is “indeed to blame for much of what it has been accused of.” Sucking, of course, is what Clear Channel has most frequently been accused of, but Foege never explains if or how the company’s brain-dead, cookie-cutter programming and dedication to the bottom line truly places it on a separate plane of suckitude than smaller rivals like, say, Emmis Communications (to whom Chicago owes such cultural treasures as “Mancow’s Morning Madhouse”).

Overall, the book suffers from a profound shallowness of historical perspective. A brief, perfunctory chapter on payola (music firms bribing broadcasters to break new songs on the air) seems almost willfully under-researched and terminates in tired waffling as to whether pay-for-play is an inevitable evil or just evil.

Regardless, for the time being this is the best book we’ve got on an important subject, and even if Clear Channel never recovers from its current slump, the issues it symbolizes aren’t going away anytime soon.