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hough not opposing radio piracy per se, these touring workshops emphasized the licensed LPFM model in a way that was in marked contrast to an earlier Radio Mutiny era tour, which had incited free radio stations to go on the air without a license in defiance of the FCC. Prometheus has continued to organize on behalf of LPFM, even when faced with the Omnibus Budget Act's efforts at "radio preservation," which reduced the number of potential licensees to about half of the FCC's originally promised number.
In the opposing camp were those, like microradio pioneers Mbanna Kantako (Human Rights Radio in Springfield, Illinois) and Stephen Dunifer (Free Radio Berkeley), who refused to endorse the lobbying of Congress in support of even the FCC's initial LPFM proposal, seeing it as an attempt at government cooptation. Moreover, as they predicted, that original proposal would ultimately fall victim to the more entrenched power of the broadcasting industry, if not in its earlier FCC stage then later on at the Congressional level, where the NAB could be relied upon to flex its lobbying muscles in an election year.
As Dunifer put it in a widely circulated email message to the free radio movement on January 12, 2000, "Writing to your Congressman is not going to do any good unless there is a check for at least $10,000 attached with a promise of more to come... Congress does not give a rat's ass about what any of us think or want. And neither does the FCC, it's all about damage control on Kennard's part. He knows that the government does not have the resources to deal with thousands of folks taking back their airwaves. So he had to come up with a strategy that would fool folks who somehow still believe the system has a degree of legitimacy and credibility and would participate in the process—just a charade really in the final analysis... Our real strength has always been the threat of an ungovernable situation on the airwaves—let's make that threat a damn credible reality by putting hundreds and thousands of free radio stations on the air."
In fact the FCC's proposal for LPFM refused to acknowledge the free radio movement's role in forcing the issue of low power broadcasting onto the public policy-making agenda in the first place. It also failed to recognize the action of seizing the airwaves as being within the framework of civil disobedience. Even the original FCC rules allowed no amnesty for the micropower broadcasters who had previously been busted or who, by remaining on the air, had challenged the FCC's old prohibition of stations under 100 watts and raised the larger issues of free speech and the "right to communicate."
When the preliminary announcement of pending LPFM rules was made, Kennard ordered illegal broadcasters to halt operations within 24 hours of being instructed to do so by the FCC or by February 26, 1999 if they expected to be eligible for possible licensing in the future. By the end of 2000 this promise had ultimately proved fleeting.
However, it had by then created a rift in the micropower movement as many unlicensed broadcasters rushed to "clean up" their acts in anticipation of LPFM licenses down the road. Those hopes were eventually dashed by the Congress. Such a sequence of events is not unusual in the context of a corporate state in which FCC liberals offered the carrot of licenses rather than simply relying on the stick of shutdowns in order to regain control of the airwaves.
The carrot was in essence the stick by other means, but the stick never fully disappeared. Instead, shutdowns actually increased, and the limited amnesty promised was removed by more conservative legislators once the damage to micropower movement solidarity had already been done.
Smothering Free Radio in Bureaucracy
any free radio broadcasters, however, refused to abandon their stations since they had no desire to be officially licensed. Others held firm out of distrust of the FCC and/or a legislative process that was dominated by the corporate broadcasting industry. By not allowing the original micropower broadcasters to be licensed if they had refused to leave the airwaves during the approximately two years that transpired from the time of Kennard's original rule-making announcement until the passage of the Omnibus Budget Act of 2000, the FCC had acted to re-establish its authority over the airwaves and punish those radio rebels who had dared to challenge it.
Yet the free radio pioneers' suspicions that even the limited amnesty promised to those of them who had never been caught and voluntarily went off the air in compliance with the new LPFM-related FCC edict were proven valid in the end. Ironically, as the first African-American chair of the FCC, Kennard's proposal was the bureaucratic equivalent of telling civil rights activist Rosa Parks that though everyone else could now sit wherever they wanted in the bus she must remain seated in the back because the Montgomery bus boycott which she helped organize had been illegal under the laws of the Jim Crow South.
Like all government regulatory agencies, in spite of its populist rhetoric, the FCC has been captured by the very interest groups that it supposedly exists to regulate. Accordingly, the license approval process is subject to industry-dictated constraints rather than the democratic priorities of redistributing the airwaves along more diverse and egalitarian lines. The FCC rules actually act to enclose free radio within bureaucratic guidelines. Though the LPFM stations were originally designated noncommercial, initial reports indicate that political dissidents, grassroots activists and groups marginalized on the basis of a progressive to radical stance on class, race, gender or sexual orientation are still to be overwhelmingly excluded from the airwaves in favor of more moderate non-profit organizations, middle class minority entrepreneurs and "respectable" church groups. In fact, almost half of the licenses approved in the first round were church-related, with many of these being awarded to right-wing Christian fundamentalists.
Moreover, a very real potential problem for new recruits to the free radio movement is that the FCC can once again claim that it has legalized low watt radio, even though Congress has drastically reduced the number of eligible stations formerly proposed. Using this pretext, it can now give its agents the green light to aggressively go after those radio stations operating without a license. Previously, public opinion was often on the side of the free radio stations, which many saw as being unjustly restricted from entry to the radio dial, but the FCC can now claim that any aspiring station should simply follow LPFM guidelines and apply for a license if it wants to broadcast.
Regardless of the dilution of the original FCC plan, the traditional regulatory idea that micropower radio stations are legitimately subject to government crackdown efforts if they decide to go on the air without first formally being licensed has been given new currency. Formerly unlicensed stations have faced ever increasing harassment since the FCC put LPFM into motion.
