April 5, 2001
Microradio, Pacifica
and Michael Powell
The Noise on I-40
By Alexander Cockburn
Gallup,
N.M. - Drive across
the United State, mostly on Interstate 40, and you have plenty
of time to listen to the radio. Even more time than usual if,
to take my own situation, you're in a 1976 Ford 350 one-ton,
ploughing along at 50mp. By day I listen to FM.
Bunked down at night, there's
some choice on the motels' cable systems, all the way from C-SPAN
to pay-as-you-snooze filth, though there's much less of that
than there used to be, or maybe you have to go to a Marriott
or kindred high end place to get that. By contrast the choice
on daytime radio, FM or AM, is indeed a vast wasteland. far more
bleak than the high plains of Texas and New Mexico I've been
looking at for the past couple of days. It's awful. Even the
religious stuff has gone to the dogs. I remember twenty years
ago making the same drive through the bible belt and you'd hear
crazed preachers raving in tongues. These days hell has gone
to love. Christian radio is so warm and fuzzy you'd think you
were listening to Terry Gross.
By any measure, and you don't need to drive along I-40 to find
this out, radio in this country is in ghastly shape. Since the
1996 Telecommunications "Reform" Act, conceived in
darkness and signed in stealth, the situation has got even worse.
Twenty, thirty years ago broadcasters could own only a dozen
stations nationwide and no more than two in any single market.
The company Clear Channel alone owns more than 800 stations pumping
out identical muck in all states. Since 1996 there's been a colossal
shake-out. Small broadcasters can no longer hack it. Two or three
companies with eight stations each control each market. Bob McChesney
cites an industry publication as saying that the amount of advertising
is up to 18 minutes per hour, with these commercials separated
by the same endless, golden oldies. On I-40 in Tennessee alone
I listened to "Help!" at least sixteen times.
The new chairman of the FCC,
Colin Powell's son Michael, has just made life even easier for
Clear Channel and the other big groups. On March 12 he okayed
32 mergers and kindred transactions in 26 markets. Three days
later, at the instigation of the FCC, cops burst into Free Radio
Cascadia in Eugene, Oregon, seized broadcasting equipment and
shut FRC down.
Michael Powell is clearly aiming
for higher things than the FCC, and he's certainly increased
his own family's resources. His okaying of the AOL-Time merger
stands to net his father Colin, a man freighted with AOL stock
options derived from his recent service on that company's board,
many millions of dollars. Michael insists there was a Chinese
wall across the family dining table and he and Dad never chatted
about AOL. Why would they need to. If there's a hippo on the
hearth rug, you don't need to put a sign on it.
Is there any chink of light
amid the darkness of radio-land? Yes, there is. Several, in fact.
For one thing, the tide may be turning in the Pacifica fight.
In the recent meeting in Houston the national Pacifica board
took a beating in its effort to fix the by-laws so as to make
it easier to continue its mission of destruction. And recent
court decisions in California have favored courtroom challenges
against the national board's onslaughts on local control of stations
such as KPFA.
Above all the Pacifica Board
in now reaping the consequences of its forcible late-night seizure
of WBAI offices last December and the barely credible arrogance
and stupidity of WBAI station manager Eutrice Lied on March 14
in pulling the plug on US Rep Major Owens in the midst of a live
broadcast because he dared discuss Pacifica's affairs.
A furious Owens has now raised
a stink on the floor of the House about Pacifica's high-handed
conduct and has put forward a plan to settle the row. Somewhere
down the road we can maybe see a scenario developing in which
the Pacifica National Board gets pushed toward the exit. In the
meantime, as Juan Gonzalez, who resigned from Democracy Now recently,
recommends: Don't finance the enemy. Put your contributions to
Pacifica stations in escrow.
And low-power radio? The commercial
broadcasters fought savagely all last year to beat back the FCC's
admittedly flawed plan to license over 1000 low power stations.
In the end the radio lobby attached a rider to an appropriations
bill signed by Clinton late last year, with regs ensuring low
power would never gain a foothold in cities, also ensuring that
the pirate broadcasters of yesteryear who created the momentum
for low power, could never get licences. But make no mistake
who the real villain was. Listen to Peter Franck of the National
Lawyers' Guild in San Francisco who has been a leading force
in the push for low power fm. "From talking to people in
DC it is absolutely clear that if NPR had not vigorously joined
the NAB in its attempt to kill microradio the legislation would
have gone through."
But all would-be low power
broadcasters should know that right now there's opportunity.
The FCC has been considering applications for licenses (in some
regions the window has already closed) and mostly it's been conservatives
(churches included) jumping in. In many states you can still
make applications to the FCC. Jump in! Contact the Lawyers' Guild's
Center of Democratic Communications at 415-522-9814 or Aakorn@igc.org,
though first take a look at their webpage www.nlgcdc.org to save
time.
These fights are all essentially
the same, against the same enemy, whether in the form of the
Pacifica Board or the directors of NPR or the NAB or the government:
the fight for democracy in communications. Here Franck and others
are already contemplating a deeper assault on the 1996 Act and
the 1934 communications Act, on constitutional grounds. The purpose
of the First Amendment is democracy. Democracy requires broad
range of opinion. After 75 years of a commercially-based media
system we have a narrow range of debate, and this abuse of the
airwaves is therefore unconstitutional. That's a big fight, but
here it comes.
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