Clear Channel shareholders are mulling the latest acquisition offer from Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee before a vote on the transaction scheduled for May 8.

Some large institutional shareholders, such as Fidelity and Highfields Capital, have signaled dissatisfaction with earlier offers. Whether the new offer is a good one is for the shareholders to decide, but the apparent dissolution of many of Clear Channel’s assets is poignant. Once the company is dismembered, it can never be put together again — nor will any other company likely replicate it, as Clear Channel built the largest radio network in the world to complement a profitable array of other advertising distribution assets.

The expectation is that large parts of Clear Channel will be sold off, both before and after the company is taken private. Clear Channel recently announced that it was selling its 56 television stations to Providence for $1.2 billion. Small groups of radio stations have also been sold for several hundred million dollars.

Founded in the 1970s by Lowry Mays and B.J. McCombs, Clear Channel grew to a small empire of a few dozen radio stations and 16 television stations by 1996. Clear Channel went public in 1984, and a $1,000 investment in Clear Channel on January 1985 would have yielded more than $24,000 by 1996, or a better than 33% annualized return.

When the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was signed into law, owning large numbers of radio stations became legal for the first time. Clear Channel saw the benefits of the new law and rapidly acquired other radio holding companies such as AMFM. Clear Channel soon owned more than 1,200 radio stations, making it the largest radio ownership group in America. Clear Channel also purchased dozens more television stations and other advertising and entertainment assets. During the four years after the passage of the 1996 law, Clear Channel equity provided a compounded return of 65% annually.

Rather than managing a sales force serving one radio station, Clear Channel had multiple sales forces in single markets that served many different radio stations as well as television and outdoor advertising. Potential advertisers could choose from a large and varied portfolio of advertising options that would have been an impossible dream just 15 years earlier. With a nationwide network, Clear Channel also had sufficient listeners to sell nationwide advertising and to purchase nationwide programming and talent. Investors saw the innovations of Clear Channel and liked them.

After 2000, the success of Clear Channel waned. It had invested heavily in traditional advertising outlets: broadcasting, outdoor advertising, entertainment, and ticket distribution. Unlike many other broadcasting companies, Clear Channel never recovered from the economic slowdown five years ago. Investments in Internet-related advertising companies such as Google and Yahoo have performed substantially better in recent years.

In the late 1990s, Clear Channel was a shining example of the success of American entrepreneurship. A few clever individuals, seeing market trends sooner than their competitors and willing to make investments based on those judgments, could grow rapidly. Such success often breeds contempt. Mr. Mays and his family became poster children for the anticonsolidation movement in America. Investors saw consolidation as more efficient broadcasting and more efficient advertising, but opponents of “media consolidation” saw big as bad.

Before 2000, Clear Channel grew successfully on the premise that individual broadcast stations or advertising venues would be worth more as part of a larger company than they would as stand-alone components. Clear Channel today divests itself on the opposite premise — that the sum of its parts is worth more than the company. That may be true today, but the current collection of broadcast and advertising assets assembled by Clear Channel will not likely be replicated. Democrats in Congress and others are unlikely to allow another consolidated broadcast company such as Clear Channel to be reassembled.

Clear Channel’s asset sales might have taken place even if the entirety of the company were not for sale. Such is the nature of ever changing market valuations. But for investors who strongly believe in the value of an integrated company with many different advertising channels, today’s dismembering of Clear Channel is a bitter pill.

A former FCC commissioner, Mr. Furchtgott-Roth is president of Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises. He is organizing the seminar series at the Hudson Institute. He can be reached at hfr@furchtgott-roth.com.