Low Power Radio. As The GOP Crush The Little Guys.

"Low Power" radio stations are cheap to operate, because they are
designed to reach a small geographical area, but they CAN reach as huge
an audience as regular radio stations, if set up in urban population
centers, next to high rise buildings.  Other countries have them, and
they haven't had any problems.  Low power stations, aside from the
diversity of views which they offer, are also very useful to small
neighborhood businesses because they only operate in a small geographic
area, therefore the advertising is targetted, as well as cost-effective.  

The pressure to shut down these "Low Power" radio stations comes from
Republicans, and the big corporations that sponsor the Republican party.
What all these big corporations forget is that they themselves started
out as small businesses.

Isn't it amazing?  How the big and the powerful, who after achieving
their greatness, stoop so low as to want to crush the little guy, in as
ruthless a manner as one would crush a cockroach.

Abel Malcolm
http://www.freeradio.org
________

The Bay Area is the capital of pirate radio stations -- low-power,
unlicensed stops on the FM dial -- and now they're leading the rebellion
against corporate giants of the airwaves, lawyers and raids by the FCC.

By James Sullivan, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

They played the in-house anthem last Thursday at the unlicensed "pirate"
radio station Freak Radio Santa Cruz.  In a show of solidarity with
fellow microradio station San Francisco Liberation Radio, which had its
broadcasting equipment confiscated in a raid by the Federal
Communications Commission on Wednesday, Freak Radio played "Screw the
FCC."

"When it's owned by corporations and theirs is the only word/ We will
seize the airwaves, speak freely and be heard," warbled the songwriter,
one Phil Free, in a style closely resembling the campus-activist folk of
the late Phil Ochs.
The next song, naturally enough, was by Rage Against the Machine.

Across the country, low-power FM radio stations are banding together to
denounce a mounting crackdown by the FCC. Supporters claim that FCC
Chairman Michael Powell, whose recent efforts to further deregulate the
radio industry have met with resistance in the courts and in Congress
and have been something of a PR disaster, is retaliating by "having his
people go out and pick on the little guys."

"It's community radio, and what this is saying is that the community
does not deserve to have a voice," said Michael Rosenberg-Beausoleil, a
disc jockey on San Francisco Liberation Radio (SFLR, 93.7 FM) who goes
by the on-air alter ego John Hell.  A high school social studies teacher
and a committed activist, a man who worked in corporate radio for years
and didn't like what he saw, Rosenberg is a prime example of the kind of
person who becomes involved in the murky world of unlicensed, low-power
FM radio.

The Bay Area is an acknowledged leader in the free-radio wars, having
set a hefty precedent in the mid-1990s with Stephen Dunifer's Free Radio
Berkeley.  That station exemplified what a small broadcaster with an
alternative viewpoint could provide for its neighborhood, before it was
shut down by court injunction in 1998.

"If micropower broadcasting could achieve some sort of critical mass or
tipping point with the people in this country, there's not much the FCC
would be able to do about it," said Dunifer on Friday -- coincidentally
the third annual Media Democracy Day, in which organizers called for a
mass show of civil disobedience from microradio operators. "Right now,
they can go after the stations one at a time."

Having organized a global network called Transmitters Uniting the
Peoples of the Americas (TUPA), Dunifer now conducts microradio training
sessions in a West Oakland workshop and on the road.  TUPA will present
a benefit screening of "Something in the Air," a feature-length
dramatization of the plight of Radio Favela, an underground Brazilian
radio station serving a slum community in the 1980s, on Nov. 2 at La
Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley.

"Our whole vision is to have hundreds of small stations dotting the
landscape," Dunifer said. "There are pockets of people in every city
basically cut off from the other media, which doesn't speak their
language."

The technology needed to mount a broadcast is minimal, he said: "You can
have a 10-watt transmitter kit and an antenna made out of $10-$15 worth
of copper pipe and fittings and have a radio station.  It's similar to
programming a VCR."

Wednesday's much more substantial equipment seizure at an unassuming
residence in the Castro district, where 10-year-old SFLR has been
situated for the past year, came three months after a warning delivered
by FCC agents.  This time, they brought a search warrant and more than a
dozen armed U.S. marshals.
SFLR attorney Peter Franck, one of the country's leading experts in
microradio law, said he was dismayed that he was not notified in advance
of the agency's plans, as he had requested by letter to the FCC.

"What's truly outrageous is that they went to a judge and got an order
of arrest of equipment without notifying us, giving us an opportunity to
be heard, " he said.
"Once you've been issued a letter of warning," explained Dunifer, "it's
a reasonable assumption that if you continue activities which you feel
are legitimate free-speech activities, you do have protection from the
court."

According to Franck, the FCC has not been forthright in its dealings
with the microradio movement, offering a strictly limited number of
licenses a few years ago and then processing the applications "molasses
slow."

"We were denied our application for a license, again without them
notifying us. I found out when I checked the Web page of the FCC."

SFLR was denied a license on two grounds. The first was what the
microradio movement calls the "bad broadcaster" rule, in which
pre-existing stations that have received warnings from the FCC in the
past are not eligible for licensing.

"That's so patently unconstitutional it's laughable," said Dunifer.

SFLR was also denied on the basis of the FCC's requirements for
frequency separation between stations. Charlotte Hatch, who along with
her husband, Jim Hatch, provides space for SFLR in her Castro residence,
compared the issue to a person sitting on a barstool. As she phrased it,
microradio supporters believe there is enough room on the dial for
someone to sit on either side, but the FCC has ruled that four seats in
each direction must be vacated.

As part of the misleadingly titled Broadcast Preservation Act of 1999,
which actually restricted the number of FCC licenses available to
low-power FM stations, Congress ordered the agency to conduct an
investigation into frequency separation. Resulting studies, conducted by
the Mitre Corp., showed that the FCC's guidelines are unnecessarily
conservative.
"There is a proposal in Congress now to allow more stations," said
Franck.
In the meantime, the low-power FM movement is feeling the heat.  Having
peaked at about 1,000 stations nationwide in 1998, the movement has an
estimated 300 now.  Many of them are the so-called "party" stations,
such as the renegade, punk-rock-oriented Pirate Cat Radio 87.9, which
broadcasts from a secret location on the Peninsula.  Such stations have
ancestral roots in United Kingdom outlets such as the storied Radio
Caroline, an offshore operation that began broadcasting in 1964 as a
pop-music alternative to the staid BBC.

"Ever see the Christian Slater movie 'Pump Up the Volume'?" asked
Franck, the attorney, referring to the 1990 feature film in which the
actor plays a disaffected high schooler who broadcasts as a pirate DJ
and incurs the wrath of the local authorities. "There are always kids
doing that." (Many of the party stations welcome the term "pirate radio"
as a badge of rebellion, while the more issues- and community-oriented
broadcasters are often deeply opposed to its outlaw implications.)

The unlicensed "party" stations appear to the activists to be in less
jeopardy than those that have political notions, such as SFLR and
Berkeley Liberation Radio, the successor to Dunifer's Free Radio
Berkeley.

"The FCC would say (the crackdown) has nothing to do with what we say,
that it's just illegal to have an unlicensed station," said Hatch, 57, a
self- described lifelong counterculture activist who says she became
involved with SFLR after events such as the 2000 election dispute and
the Iraqi war left her feeling disenfranchised.

"If you ask me, I'd say if we were an unlicensed Christian station, it's
possible we'd still be on the air."

FCC spokesman David Fiske did not return a phone call seeking comment
last week.  But Cheryl Koel, the supervisory deputy U.S. marshal who was
the lead agent in Wednesday's seizure at SFLR, rebutted the idea that
the FCC's actions are politically motivated.

"We don't have an agenda to go after stations that particularly downplay
the government," she said. "There's no hidden agenda there. These people
are warned.
"Some people just don't like to recognize the government."

That's precisely the point, say the activists.  They argue that the
deregulation of radio has left the airwaves in the hands of a few
corporate giants that have little interest in catering to diverse
neighborhoods or providing a forum for dissenting voices.  Microradio
operators see their cause as a crucial component of free speech.

"We were willing to risk this," said Charlotte Hatch, whose daughter,
Karoline, is an SFLR disc jockey, "because if the people don't keep
their toe in the door" -- the airwaves -- "the door is going to be shut.
And it's not gonna be opened by a corporation."

Dunifer and his colleagues accuse the FCC of alarmist tactics. "They
have all kinds of straw-person arguments," said Dunifer, "like the claim
that airplanes will fall from the sky" because of interference with
air-traffic control frequencies. "It's an amazing campaign of
disinformation and
outright lies."

Though last week's confiscation at SFLR was carried out without
resistance, FCC raids have at times taken on an element of farce.  One
seizure at a party station in Florida featured "a multijurisdictional
task force, a SWAT team, the whole nine yards," contends Dunifer. "They
almost shot a cat when it jumped off a table."
Richard Edmondson, a co-founder of SFLR, was once broadcasting from a
camper on Twin Peaks when he was spotted by an FCC agent.  He drove off,
but the agent called the San Francisco Police Department.

According to Dunifer, Edmondson was soon surrounded by "at least 10
patrol cars, with 15 to 20 cops with their guns drawn, telling him to
kiss the asphalt." When the officers learned of the nature of the
offense, "they were looking at each other like, 'FCC'?

"It points out the absurdity of all this," he said. "But on another
level, it's pretty chilling."

E-mail James Sullivan at james [EMAIL PROTECTED]

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle
URL:
sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/10/21/DD35002.DTL

"In the end, through the long ages of our quest for light, it will be
found that truth is still mightier than the sword":

Gen. Douglas MacArthur (Graduated from West Point at the top of his
class, then served brilliantly in WW1, WW2 & the Korean war)

Educate yourself and go to these links:

http://www.buzzflash.com & http://www.moveon.org &
http://www.veteransforpeace.org & http://www.salon.com &
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/LiberalFAQ.htm &
http://www.barbrastreisand.com