(Low) Power to the People

by Danny Schechter

The Nation magazine, May 24, 1999, page 9

Franz GourGue had been a ham-radio operator in Haiti; Sara Zia Ebrahimi, an activist at the Gainesville, Florida, Civic Media Center; and Pete TriDish, as he's now known, a student in Philadelphia.

None of these microradio rebels knew one another until their lives converged recently at an energized weekend seminar for wannabe broadcasters held in a reconditioned firehouse near New York City's Chinatown, home of the Downtown Community Television Center. They had come to share experiences and teach others how to get on the air with a few hundred dollars in primitive equipment.

Powered by no more than forty watts, the average range of these stations is two to five miles. No one is sure how many exist. Some say 1,000; FCC regulators report shutting down 360 in the past eighteen months. Some are clandestine and fancy themselves pirates; others, like Boston's Radio Free Allston, which was run from an ice-cream parlor until the Feds pulled the plug, operate openly.

However small in reach, these microradio stations are now in the cross-hairs of a high-stakes political battle. At issue is the legality of their very existence. For years, federal communications laws permitted only licensed stations, so the government could limit the number any one company could own; but it also hounded smaller, unlicensed stations. Once the laws were "reformed" with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, large companies quickly monopolized the marketplace; four media conglomerates have since purchased 10 percent of the country's 10,231 radio stations, according to former FCC chairman Reed Hundt. The Boston Phoenix's Dan Kennedy noted the consequences: "The corporatization of radio...is destroying a uniquely intimate medium, replacing real community voices, people with a sense of place and purpose, with the same sound-alike shows in city after city, town after town.... It's highly profitable. And it sucks."

Microradio broadcasters say they offer an alternative-and it looks like they may have convinced the FCC. Current FCC chairman William Kennard, concerned that minority ownership of broadcast outlets has recently fallen from a whopping 3 percent to 1.5 percent, now sees microradio as one remedy. "We can create a whole new class of voices who can use the airwaves for their communities," he says. The agency is now receiving comments on its proposal to license smaller stations, including low-power outlets. Microradio activists have flooded the commission with supportive letters, even as they privately fear that any new regulations might constrain counter-culture tendencies. For example, one proposal under consideration would deny licenses to stations currently operating in defiance of the law.

The FCC will accept comments through June 12, but its rule-making could drag on for years. That is, if the initiative is not killed sooner by a politically connected broadcast lobby that has already declared war on the idea, charging that it will gum up industry digital strategies. Says Eddie Fritts, president of the National Association of Broadcasters (and college roommate of Senate majority leader Trent Lott), "This proposal will likely cause devastating interference...to broadcasters."

Of course, that is precisely what some in the insurgent microradio movement want. Activists at the New York gathering wore T-shirts with slogans like "If it wasn't for commercial radio, we wouldn't know what to buy." The seminar was plastered with posters proclaiming "LET 10,000 ANTENNAS RADIATE" and "FCC: ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE."

This movement is quite diverse, organized by a coalition of college-age radicals and community-based businesspeople, including many minorities. Its lobbying arm is the Microradio Empowerment Coalition. "We are mounting an emergency campaign to mobilize the public behind legislation that will legalize microradio as well as guarantee rights for non-commercial broadcasters," explains organizer Greg Ruggiero, who is also a plaintiff in a First Amendment lawsuit, Free Speech v. Janet Reno, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Franz from Haiti, for example, runs Radio Nago in Brooklyn (89.3), offering a blend of Haitian music, culture and conversation that can't be found on the commercial dial. The station also features interviews with immigration lawyers-a service popular with listeners. Twenty-one-year-old Sara Zia from Florida took to the airwaves because she couldn't find her kind of music in a college town where public radio, she says, 'plays only classical music 24/7." When her station was silenced by the FCC, she moved north with hopes of launching a women's station. It was then that she met Pete TriDish (many of these radio activists use noms de media guerre). He launched Philly's Radio Mutiny after Temple University radio censored commentaries by Mumia Abu Jamal. "Everything I do links getting the right to broadcast to challenging the monopolies of the media order," he told me.

The stations are waging a hit-and-run guerrilla media war against FCC enforcers. They download and air news reports from one another via a Web site. On New York's Lower East Side, a station calling itself "Steal This Radio," a la Abbie Hoffman, was ejected from a dilapidated tenement after FCC investigators persuaded the electric company to disconnect the power. Now they're in a community center but can only transmit at night, after a nursery school that shares the space sends the kids home. My recent visit to its tiny studio followed a hip-hop show "by kids in the projects," a professionally DJ'd blues program and an hour of FIying Saucer News read from Internet dispatches.

Will microradio make a difference in our tightly controlled broadcast spectrum? The short answer is that it already does- pressuring the FCC to reconsider its stance and illustrating, even by the limited reach of its puny radio signals, how much still has to be done to open up the communications system to many more voices and real media choices.

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Danny Schechter, executive producer of Globalvision, is the author of The More You Watch, The Less You Know (Seven Stories). He spent ten years as a radio newscaster at WBCN-FM in Boston.

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