Revisiting Low Power

For the first time in memory, enormous broadcast conglomerates haven't fared well in Washington, DC lately.

The massive media ownership deregulation pushed through the FCC last month by Republican chairman Michael Powell generated a remarkable amount of resistance, from a burgeoning, and relatively new, media democracy movement. Deregulation opponents had vowed to override the FCC by taking the fight to the Republican-controlled Congress. It seemed like a futile notion, but on July 16, the powerful, Republican-run House Appropriations Committee panel took the first step toward doing exactly that, voting 40-25 to block the portion of the FCC's decision that expanded from 35% to 45% the percentage of national TV households one company's stations could reach. The following week, the measure sailed through the entire House as part of an appropriations bill that passed 400-21.

The vote wouldn't affect other portions of the FCC decision, and it would still need to be reconciled with a Senate bill; the White House has vowed to veto the House move. Nonetheless, even if it goes no farther--and it will - - the House vote is an important measure of just how widespread dissatisfaction with corporate control of America's media has become, and that such dissatisfaction transcends usual ideological labels.

The House vote wasn't simply a case of an otherwise-unpopular measure slipping through as a rider on an unpopular bill. Broadcast giants like Disney, Viacom, Fox, and Time-Warner-AOL tried hard to stop it--and conservatives and liberals alike refused. Conservative Christian couch potatoes, sick of sitcoms that are a half-hour of explicit sexual innuendo and cop shows that glorify mindless violence, are becoming just as angry about the loss of local content and control over broadcasting as progressive media democracy advocates. The Republican House majority voted solidly against the FCC deregulation despite the veto threat of their own president.

But beyond the headlines, another development on the media democracy front last month may have far greater long-term implications for the ability of ordinary people to be heard on the airwaves.

Before Dubya came to power and Michael Powell assumed the FCC's reins, the media democracy movement that is now bedeviling him cut its teeth on another FCC fight--Low Power FM (LPFM). A 1999 decision by the FCC, when it was under Democratic control, created a vast new category of non-commercial, low power FM stations. The stations were to be locally run, with a radius of about 2-3 miles, and promised to give access to the airwaves to thousands of community, church, and activist groups across the country.

It never happened--at least, not as originally envisioned by the FCC. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and National Public Radio mobilized Congress to effectively gut the program by passing as law a more stringent set of technical requirements. The NAB/NPR bill eliminated over 80% of the proposed stations, including most of the ones in larger cities and towns. Commercial broadcasters, as well as NPR, claimed (despite the FCC's claims to the contrary) that the FCC's original criteria would create unacceptable interference to existing stations. Congress bought the idea, and as a result, while some Low Power FM stations are in fact now broadcasting, and many others are in the pipeline, only one open frequency for a low power station is available in any of the country's top 50 markets--as opposed to over a dozen each that would have been available in some cities under the original proposal. In the Seattle area, rather than having several frequencies available in-city, one allocation, positioned just so, opened up in Carnation. Otherwise, stations are in places like the San Juans and the Okanogan--valuable facilities for their communities, but not where most of our state's people live.

That original LPFM proposal was overturned by Congress three years ago. Last month, however, results came back in from a technical study Congress ordered as part of its legislation, a study intended to determine definitively whether the original, more lax FCC guidelines would in fact pose a threat to existing stations.

The verdict: almost never.

The study, farmed out by the FCC to Mitre Corp., conducted field research and also asked for listener feedback, using the relatively poor-quality analog receivers common in many households rather than the much higher-quality receivers the FCC had originally used to determine interference levels. The researchers still found almost no problems, either from complaining listeners or from their own field readings, in a half-dozen different test stations around the country.

In the mostly rural areas where it's been available, the volume of applications for LPFM facilities has far exceeded the FCC's expectations, proving that there's an enormous demand for such voices. The FCC, of course, is now in different, more business-friendly hands, and is probably disinclined to revisit the previous commission's proposal. And in the intervening three years, big media corporations as well as NPR affiliates have rushed to install new translators that would now block some possible LPFM frequencies in larger cities. But the upshot is that media activists now have the data to go back to the FCC and to Congress, and to demand both that the LPFM program be expanded to its original scope and that a moratorium be placed on new translator applications until the LPFM question is re-examined.

More broadly, for years the NAB, as the lobbying arm of the country's largest media conglomerates, has had free run of Capitol Hill; it has been among the most effective of the trade lobbying groups, with "triumphs" like the appalling Telecommunications Act of 1996 to its credit. Its LPFM reversal in 2000 was another such triumph--but now, media activists and other broadcast lobby opponents can use the LPFM example to discredit the piteous cries of well-heeled lobbyists.

The damage that LPFM would supposedly cause to broadcasters simply didn't exist, and the case for re-instating the original proposal is overwhelming. Now, with any luck, a powerful new form of community and neighborhood broadcasting can be made available to the vast majority of the country's people.

For over 70 years, publicly owned airwaves have been leased out essentially at no charge to a broadcast industry increasingly dominated by a handful of homogenous (and often dreadfully idiotic) voices. For the last quarter- century, radio and television have gotten farther and farther away from the notion of local programming, local ownership, and community service. Finally, the trend may be reversing.