Prometheus Press Center

Prometheus De-Livered

Our Periodic Newsletter

9 November 2001

Contents

[What's New In LPFM]
[Corporations Who Own Too Much]
[Something Rotten in the State of California]
[Call for Computer Programmers and Wireless Explorers: Research projects in streaming links and WIFI]
[Radio Barnraising Scheduled]
[Lake County Radio on the Air]
[Appendix B Status Screwed up By Congress]
[Fundraising Help]

[Get Prometheus De-livered in the comfort of your own electronic mail box -- register online]

What's New In Low Power Radio and Prometheus

According to Christian Community Broadcasters' scrupulous record keeping, the FCC has issued about 120 low power construction permits. Six stations are now on the air, one or two of those has applied for its final license. Most applicants are still waiting to hear from the FCC, though 55 have had their applications dismissed. Since August, there have been no major new lists released Permits from windows 1 and 2 continue to trickle out. Rumor has it that the FCC's next priorities are starting to process "singletons" (applications with no competition) from the window 3 states. It seems like it could be a while before any of the more complicated applications, even from window 1 and 2 from early last year, are processed.

		June 1 FCC Releases List of Grantable Applications Join a Prometheus Workgroups Putting it All Together February WRYR Goes on the Air This Month Activist Agenda for Low Power FM Microradio in Court FCC Anthrax Scare Prometheus Comments on Emergency Alert System (EAS) Price Research March Demonstration at the FCC News From the FCC November What's New In LPFM Lake County Radio on the Air Appendix B Status Screwed up By Congress Fundraising Help Corporations Who Own Too Much Something Rotten in the State of California Call for Computer Programmers and Wireless Explorers: Research projects in streaming links and WIFI July 90 Construction Permits Released, First LPFM on the Air New Low Power Email List Appendix B Applications and Petitions to Deny Scamologist Alert! Rumour Control

Who is putting in the largest number of Informal objections to Low power FM applications? The NAB? NPR? Guess again, it is Prometheus, Microradio Implementation Project, the National Lawyers Guild and Christian Community Broadcasters! Some national church organizations appear to have put in dozens of applications through their affiliates to turn Low Power Radio into a Low Power Empire. Read more about it below in "Something Rotten in California."

Our advice if you are in window 4/5, and are competing with other applicants: take up fishing, or some other hobby. Put your application in the drawer and forget about it for a while. Your radio station permit will come: but worrying about it will do you no good. Don't rent a space right now. If you already rented a space ( as quite a few have) use it for something else for a while.

Do start low key fundraising activities, like bake sales and benefit concerts. Try to raise a few hundred dollars a month and put it away. There are about a hundred construction permits that are sitting unused right now because people didn't raise money till they got the permit, and now they are scrambling to find large amounts of money. Most grantmaking institutions don't like to give out big grants until they have seen that the organization is capable of doing small, volunteer intensive grassroots fundraising.

Spend some time reading up on audio and radio- there are introductory resources on our website, and more are coming. And start gathering audio equipment and a good couple of computers.

One thing that has worked well for Radio Volta in Philadelphia has been launching an internet radio station while waiting for our FCC license to come through. This way, we set up the whole audio studio, and people could get practice doing their shows before going FM. Some programmers have actually picked up bigger internet audiences than they could have dreamed of on FM. And one programmer, the Reverend Bookburn asked that his show not go on FM when we got our permit, because his content (satirical shows about subjects like the hypocrisy of the religious right) would not pass the obscenity rules of the FCC for FM, but was very popular on the internet.

Corporations Who Own Too Much: FCC moves towards gutting media cross-ownership rules

We include this action alert from FAIR about the FCC's impending plan to allow corporations to own newspapers and broadcast stations in the same market. Our comments will follow:

FAIR ACTION ALERT:
FCC Moves to Lift Cross-Ownership Ban
October 26, 2001

Just two days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FCC began to eliminate the last remaining shreds of regulation on media concentration. With all eyes elsewhere, the FCC voted unanimously to "review" laws that prohibit the same company from owning both a newspaper and a TV station in the same geographic area, and laws that limit the percent of the national audience that a single cable company can reach. FCC Chair Michael Powell has made no secret of his desire to abandon any substantive public interest restrictions on the dominance of big media corporations, claiming "the oppressor here is regulation." (See "Their Man in Washington,"). He even presented this latest move as a patriotic act, declaring, "The flame of the American ideal may flicker, but it will never be extinguished...We will do our small part and press on with our business, solemnly, but resolutely."

Pressure to drop the cross-ownership ban comes from companies like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., whose recent acquisition of station operator Chris-Craft puts it in violation, giving it two TV stations and a newspaper in New York City. (News Corp. already had a waiver to operate one TV station and a newspaper in New York.) There are more than 40 markets with newspaper-broadcast combinations already, most 'grandfathered' in when the law was written in 1975. Other companies in violation of the law include the Tribune Co. which owns TV-broadcast combinations in Los Angeles, New York, Orlando and Chicago.

Powell has called the cross-ownership ban "extremely prohibitive," and said he sees no reason a city's TV station and newspaper shouldn't be controlled by the same company. Indeed, media corporations routinely make deals that violate existing law, so confident are they of the current anti-regulatory climate-"skating where the puck is going to be," is how one industry analyst described it (L.A. Times, 9/14/01).

Besides the wholly predictable result of a single company controlling a town's TV stations, radio stations, cable company and only newspaper, critics warn that elimination of this rule will essentially signal the absorption of the newspaper business into the television industry, with a negative impact on the quality of print journalism. Newspaper companies "see savings in news gathering by combining with TV stations as a big plus," an industry analyst told the L.A. Times (9/14/01), giving an indication that the newly merged megacompanies would provide communities with less news, not more.

FCC reviews include a mandatory public comment period to give Americans a chance to weigh in on proposed regulations. Examination of some previous public comment periods shows that the comments received are often few and are overwhelmingly drawn from media companies and industry trade organizations. The deadline for comment on the cable ownership cap has been extended toJanuary 4, 2002; FAIR will release more information on that soon. More urgent right now are comments about the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban, which are due by December 3. At a time of crisis, the dangers of such overwhelming concentration in media are more glaring than ever. The changes underway will make U.S. media even less diverse, more commercial and less accountable to the public.

ACTION: Please let the FCC know that lifting the cross-ownership ban to allow further media consolidation will not serve the public interest.

Because the FCC has time-consuming requirements for email comments which require that people format their message in a certain way, FAIR created a form to simplify the process. You can submit comments to the FCC about cross-ownership at:
http://www.fair.org/mailform.php

For more details on the FCC's efforts to weaken ownership rules, see the Center for Digital Democracy's in-depth resources:
http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/mediaownership/index.html

and Media Channels page on the current state of media concentration: http://www.mediachannel.org/atissue/ownership/

If you look at Chairman Powells' recent statements on this issue, he claims that the current rules must be radically re-evaluated and any restrictions on cross ownership must be justified by rigorous, scientific evidence. He further says that the courts are finding these rules to be based on outdated, unscientific policy judgements, and that "I believe that diversity is important, but if we don't start banging our heads about creating a better foundation and a more rigorous way of making these evaluations, we are going to be standing on the deck of the titanic as these values and this ship slip below the waves."

Well, who could be against science? It is always good to have more information at your disposal when making such weighty decisions.

Unfortunately, in the communications policy world, the scientific scrutiny game ends up being won by whoever can afford to fund the most pages of "evidence" to drop on the Commissions desk. And this is rarely the public interest advocates. Unfortunately, science tends to favor those who can afford to buy some.

To Micheal Powell, some questions seem to deserve scientific scrutiny while others do not. We need scientific evidence to prove why a corporation should be limited to owning 8 stations rather than ten stations- but we need no scientific evidence to prove why anyone needs to own more than one broadcast station, even though there are tens of thousands of people in the US who would like to own one broadcast station but effectively can not.

If they really want to study something, how about studying how media consolidation affects minority ownership of broadcast outlets? Or how mergers affect the size of news staffs, especially news staffs that do hard news, investigative journalism, and overseas coverage?

If you live in a town where there is already cross ownership of broadcast and newspaper properties, please document the effects that this has on the quality of local news and tell the Commission about it. But write comments regardless of whether you have " scientific evidence." It doesn't take a sociological study to know that if a small elite control the media, our democracy will become ever more susceptible to manipulation by demagogues and corporate power.

Something Rotten in the State of California

byCaroline Nappo, Prometheus intern

We here at the Prometheus Radio Project empathize with the pains one must take in applying for a Low Power FM permit. Since its humble beginnings in 1998, Prometheus has worked alongside various groups in their attempts to win a coveted LPFM license from the FCC. All the questions, the technical specifications, the required documentsŠ this is the stuff that migraines are made of. We know the agony and the ecstasy one goes through on the road to bringing LPFM to a community. Naturally, knowing the precision and patience it takes to put together an application, the idea of some group or individual attempting to win a license by taking an easy route really chaps our behinds. When all is said and done, though, that daunting application, dreamed up by the FCC, ensures that the best possible applicant will be awarded the much sought after license. Right?

Wrong! While reviewing applications for community groups with whom we were working, Pete discovered that many of those groups were competing with an organization called Calvary Chapel. His interest piqued, he conducted a general search for Calvary Chapel LPFM applicants - and 151 applications came up! Delving deeper into the web of intrigue, Pete learned that this Calvary Chapel outfit already had 278 broadcast licenses! Apparently, they hope that the FCC will be so busy and overworked that they will not notice the specifics of the application - particularly, the parts that determine the legitimacy of any professed community presence. More research on our part revealed Calvary Chapel to be a group of affiliated churches, with a main base located in Costa Mesa, California. Now you can find its didactic tentacles all over the world, although most of the chapels are found in the United States.

In the beginning of our search, we found that most of the viewable online exhibits fit into one of three templates. The most popular format was the one we dubbed "Contemporary Social Problems," which attests to the applicant's generic desire to address pandemic issues such as "crime" and "drug and alcohol abuse." Naturally, we protest these exhibits not because we don't think those issues are important, but because the Calvary applications do not show how they plan to address those issues on a community level. The Calvary Chapel applications seem less locally motivated and more like some mastermind's scheme to dominate the airwaves.

Under the guise of creating a community station, most of the Calvary Chapel affiliates appear to have a much more nefarious agenda: to obtain as many licenses as possible for the purpose of establishing a satellite broadcasting LPFM network. Ostensibly unable to sufficiently illustrate their community presence, the individual churches were out of luck. In order to make up for this integral part of the application, someone(s) created a template that for the applicants to use. All the chapels had to do was fill in the blank and, voila - an exhibit was born. In all fairness, we must note that there were a few ("few" being the operative word) Calvary applications that demonstrated a specific community presence. Some of these stations wanted to provide bilingual programming for their communities, and one chapel bought dogs for police stations. However, most of the time, even this half hearted display of community involvement was not the case.

Of the 151 applications online, we were able to view about sixty of those exhibits. With the help of the NLGCDC (Center for Democratic Communications of the National Lawyers Guild) we filed 45 informal objections. Unable to access 75 of the exhibits online, we piled into Hedy Lamarr (Pete's Ford Escort station wagon, named for the starlet/spread spectrum inventor) and headed on down to the nation's capitol to pay a visit to the FCC. Once inside the building, we filled out form after form after form requesting the remaining 75 files we needed to see. After spending all day there, chatting with file clerks and making enough photo copies to wallpaper Prometheus' humble office ten times over, we left with 57 more exhibits to use in petitions to deny. Furthermore, we discovered three more templates amongst the various applications. That makes for a total of 102 potential exhibits for informal objections!

Is there a problem with churches wanting radio stations? Not at all, if the individual churches are actually involved in their respective communities. The problem with affiliated churches applying for permits is that they are not applying for these permits in moments of divine inspiration, but out of wanting to establish a satellite network for the main base. Not only is this illegal under the guidelines set up by the FCC, but this practice is unfair to groups who actually have an established local presence and do not get awarded permits.

In the end we don't know if the FCC will bat an eyelash at our findings, but we hope that they take violations like these seriously. We have had ample help from other LPFM advocacy groups, particularly the Microradio Implementation Project out of Portland, Oregon. They are another great resource for non profit groups starting up non-commercial stations; they have also uncovered similar misdeeds (à la Calvary Chapel) done by other groups. A rep from MIP innocuously started calling board members listed on applications for various church-affiliated groups in the Wisconsin area, with the intent of offering information on MIP's services. After talking to some confused individuals in America's Dairyland, she discovered that the board members had no idea that they were listed on the application! Whoever put together the applications just used names of unsuspecting people for board members. The intention for a low power FM station? To continually broadcast satellite fed programming - not local programming.

Unfortunately, with the advent of legalized low power FM, there are those who will take advantage of a good thing. We are not omniscient and therefore we cannot be aware of every instance in which this type of abuse occurs. If you know of anything going on in your town, you don't have to take it! Let us know if you see anything of this nature going on and we will check it out.

For more information:

Microradio Implementation Project
http://www.microradio.org

Center for Democratic Communications of the National Lawyers Guild:
http://www.nlgcdc.org