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Outlet profile

iHeartMedia

U.S. right-leaning

Owned byPublicly traded (NASDAQ: IHRT); largest single shareholder is Global Media Entertainment Investments Ltd (~24%); institutional investors including PIMCO, Franklin Templeton, and Fidelity collectively hold the majority of shares. CEO and chairman is Bob Pittman.
FundingPrimarily advertising-supported across broadcast radio, podcasts, digital audio, and live events. Total revenue was approximately $3.86 billion in 2025. The company claims roughly 40% of all U.S. radio advertising spend.
On the administrationbroadly supportive

Background

iHeartMedia traces its roots to 1972, when investment banker Lowry Mays and auto dealer B.J. 'Red' McCombs paid $125,000 for a San Antonio FM station, founding what became Clear Channel Communications. Over the 1990s and 2000s, Clear Channel grew aggressively through acquisitions to become the dominant U.S. radio conglomerate. In roughly 2008, private equity firms Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners took the company private in a $26.7 billion leveraged buyout, saddling it with debt that would eventually prove fatal. Clear Channel rebranded as iHeartMedia in 2014. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2018 with more than $20 billion in outstanding debt; it emerged in 2019 after eliminating $10.3 billion of that obligation, shifting ownership from private equity to institutional creditors and public shareholders. Throughout its history, iHeartMedia's talk radio division has been the dominant national carrier of conservative hosts including Rush Limbaugh (until his death in 2021), Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Mark Levin, and it has partnered with Fox News Radio to distribute conservative news content across more than 100 stations. The company has also expanded heavily into podcasting and became the largest U.S. podcast publisher by downloads. A 2024 initiative called Reasoned Choice Media was positioned as a more politically diverse podcast network, though its output remains minor relative to the company's conservative talk radio footprint.

Sources

  1. Who Owns iHeartMedia | Free Press
  2. iHeartMedia Emerges From Chapter 11 - Radio World
  3. iHeartMedia files for Chapter 11 — Financier Worldwide
  4. iHeartMedia Says Revenue Grew Slightly in 2025 - Radio World
  5. iHeartMedia Claims 40% of All US-Based Radio Advertising Spend
  6. iHeart Launching Politically-Focused Reasoned Choice Media Podcast Network | Inside Radio
  7. iHeartMedia Bankruptcy Plan Approved - Variety
  8. iHeart Media Bankruptcy - NPR

Profile compiled 2026-08-23; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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