By BombThrowers -- Hayden Ludwig —— Bio and Archives September 22, 2017
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… Because of the scarcity of radio frequencies, there was no First Amendment right for all citizens to own a radio license…the right of viewers and listeners was paramount, not the right of broadcasters.During the Cold War, these pirates organized demonstrations using Marxist-Leninist propaganda, stylizing themselves the proletarian vanguard in the fight against corporate control of radio. The pirates held that low power FM licenses are essential to ending media consolidation and offering local reporting to communities. Privately, however, they espoused revolutionary goals: toppling corporate control being chief among their aims. This left-wing pseudo-intelligentsia envisioned low power FM radio as an essential component in the radicalization of America. Without LPFM—or “microradio,” as it also called—Marxists could never effectively mount a broader cultural war. Radical radio outlets spread quickly during the 1990s as individual stations coalesced under the professional Left. Groups like Steal This Radio and Radio Free Berkeley were merged or replaced with broader coalitions such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and the San Francisco, California-based Microradio Empowerment Coalition (MEC). Unlike most pirate radio stations, these coalitions were not single-issue outfits. Instead, they sought to expand LPFM as part of a larger progressive agenda. According to the book Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations, the MEC organized the Green Party, native American tribes, and the American Civil Liberties Union to support LPFM licensing. But Sarah Zia Ebrahimi, a member of MEC’s steering committee, admits that the movement’s ultimate objective is far more extreme than merely expanding LPFM legality. Ebrahimi calls the “complete redistribution of [radio] spectrum” a “great idea”—if currently unfeasible. FAIR regularly assails capitalism and conservatives as the stooges of Big Business. FAIR’s founder, Jeff Cohen, now works at RootsAction.org, the new font for his extremism. In Cohen’s words:
We need a fresh approach to defend the public interest. Our country faces a far-right Republican Party regime that is largely a subsidiary of corporate America, and a Democratic Party whose leadership is enmeshed with corporate power.
The media system reflect[s] the nature of the U.S. political economy, and any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist political economy.
This is a movement made up of hundreds of community groups who operate unlicensed clandestine radio stations in much the same spirit that Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus: to resist and challenge a dehumanizing and unconstitutional system.The FCC’s decision to ban low power FM radio constitutes, Ruggiero says, mixing his metaphors, an “Iron Curtain” akin to “Hitler’s Germany.” Pirate radio in the U.S., he adds, is like the World War II “resistance movement [that] used unlicensed radio as a strategy against the Nazis.” Ruggiero wholeheartedly supports LPFM expansion. Along with his longtime crony, John Nichols, McChesney profiles his case for media statism in a 2003 essay entitled Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media:
Media reform needs its equivalent of the Voting Rights Act or the Equal Rights Amendment—simple, basic reforms that everyone can understand, embrace and advocate in union halls, church basements and school assemblies. There is no way around it: Structural media reform is mandatory if we are serious about addressing the crisis of democracy in the United States.Not coincidentally, first on the McChesney-Nichols laundry list of structural reforms is the establishment of “low-power, non-commercial community radio and television stations across the nation.” In 2003, McChesney and Nichols founded Free Press, a so-called “media reform” group that cut its teeth campaigning for the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act. That act restricted political spending and individual contributions until it was altered by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling. Seeking to restrict political speech online, Free Press then shifted its focus to establishing net neutrality—the rule giving the FCC full control to regulate the Internet—a fight it won under the Obama administration in 2015 (the Trump FCC has since signaled its intent to undo the rules). Little wonder, then, that Free Press is eagerly funded by the anti-free speech cabal, including George Soros’ Open Society Institute, Bill Moyers’ Center for Media and Democracy, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Six months from today, the first low power radio stations may be on the air…Unfortunately, there are those who have been working non-stop to keep those first small stations from going on the air. Why? Because they know that once new voices can be heard, nothing can silence them. This is about the haves—the broadcast industry—trying to prevent many have-nots—small community and educational organizations—from having just a little piece of the pie. Just a little piece of the airwaves which belong to all of the people.
The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the industry’s trade association, pushed back. They found an unlikely ally in National Public Radio (NPR)—a traditionally liberal, government-funded outlet. Together, the NAB and NPR argued that hundreds of small new stations would cause interference with major broadcasting bands on the dial, without increasing minority ownership. Their protests fell on deaf ears, however. The real intent of the LPFM decision—filling the airwaves with propaganda—was always ideological, never practical. The evidence is in the figures: the NAB in 2000 represented some 5,400 stations nationwide; under the 2000 LPFM rules, the FCC estimated it could eventually license as many as 4,000 low power stations. The NAB-NPR coalition succeeded in lobbying Congress to pass the Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act of 2000. The law authorized the FCC’s low power licensing, but ordered the agency to cease licensing of stations that had operated illegally (radio pirates). It also ordered an independent study of the interference issue by the Mitre Corporation, an engineering research nonprofit. The plan backfired. To NAB-NPR’s chagrin, the study, completed in 2003, reported no interference by LPFM stations on existing bands. Free Press executive director Josh Silver spoke triumphantly:
Low Power FM stands out in an era of massive media consolidation. The public is pleading for the opportunity to expand this service into larger cities and increase the diversity of local voices. Congress shouldn’t stand in the way of these community-oriented stations any longer.
Specifically, the Commission proposes a set of service floors to ensure at least eight LPFM channels in markets 1-20, seven in markets 21-50, six in markets 51-100 and five in markets 101-150 (as well as smaller markets where more than four translator applications are pending).In just over a decade, “media justice activists” managed to transform LPFM radio from a federally harangued to a federally mandated medium—quite a feat. Obama FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn hailed the triumph in vaguely revolutionary tones:
Today, we start the countdown on the return of local voices to the radio waves, as low power radio stations will finally be given space to broadcast in large urban markets.Clyburn went on to thank the radio pirates who organized the Left’s takeover of LPFM radio, offering a “special thanks” to Prometheus Radio Project—quite a feat, indeed.
LPFM stations are spread across all 50 states. Twenty-two states have a moderate number of stations (20-39), though three have more than 100 stations each: Florida (121), Texas (114) and California (102).It remains to be seen what effect these stations will have on future generations of radio listeners, or whether many of them will even be able to keep up with maintenance costs. But one thing is certain: conservatives have work to do in the fight for media control. In future years, they may discover an ugly truth—there’s nothing low energy about the low power Left. Hayden Ludwig is the Communications Assistant at Capital Research Center.
Bombthrowers is a blog about politics and the war for the hearts and minds of Americans from a conservative viewpoint.
In line with our name, we do not hold back. We have a take-no-prisoners attitude when it comes to fighting for conservative principles. The Left doesn’t play nice, and that’s why they’ve been winning. It’s time for conservatives to rise up and turn the tide.
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Bombthrowers is a project supported by the Capital Research Center. Its editor-in-chief is Matthew Vadum.