Clear Channel has invoked the impending "peril" of a merged XM/Sirius satellite service to repeat its oft made request for Federal Communications Commission permission to buy more radio stations.

"The only circumstance under which approval of the proposed merger might survive scrutiny under the Commission's public interest test would be if the Commission were to contemporaneously eliminate all local radio ownership regulations," Clear Channel Vice President Andrew Levin wrote to the FCC on July 9th, "thus freeing local radio broadcasters to be in a position to match the competition between XM and Sirius that would be lost."

Clear Channel submitted its comments as part of the public proceeding that the FCC is running on the proposed merger. The Commission will take statements until July 24th.

For several years Clear Channel has lobbied the FCC and Congress to increase the number of radio stations an entity can own in a big regional market from eight to as many as twelve licenses. But at the same time, the radio giant has also campaigned against the proposed merger of XM and Sirius, inveighing against the "peril of content exclusivity."

The new merged entity would, Clear Channel warns, would "control an enormous swath of spectrum," even more than Congress has recently set aside for an interoperable public safety network. In addition, the married XM/Sirius company would be able to "lock up high-value content," denying free radio broadcasters access to it.

"With poorer content, local radio stations will lose listeners, and, consequently, advertisers," Levin argues, "not because local radio would face a better competitor after the merger, but because it would be able to offer only an inferior product to listeners and advertisers."

The filing does not mention that Clear Channel owns a 3 percent stake in XM, programming ten of its channels, according to Clear Channel Chief Executive John Hogan in an interview with Forbes magazine on May 25th. But it paints the portrait of a married XM/Sirius controlling an unprecedented quantity of frequency space, approximately 25MHz of spectrum by Clear Channel's estimate.

"By contrast," the company observes, "even in the largest markets, under the current local radio ownership rules, a single entity may control only slightly more than 1 MHz of spectrum, or up to 8 channels, and even then, only in an extremely limited geographical area (i.e., a single radio market). Thus, a combined XM-Sirius would control nearly 25 times more spectrum, and 40 times more channels than any other single competitor in any given market (and even 2 to 3 times the number of channels for all other competitors in that market (AM and FM) combined)."

And so the filing concludes by suggesting that if the FCC approves an XM/Sirius merger, it should also allow Clear Channel to expand beyond its current ownership of 1168 radio stations, representing about 8.5 percent of the free radio market.

"With the current ownership caps in place, free, local radio cannot be considered anything near a meaningful competitor to a merged XM-Sirius," Levin concludes.