The number of voices heard on American radio keeps shrinking, as localstations lose ground bit by bit to a few big companies' stranglehold onownership and programming. Federal Communications Commission ChairmanWilliam Kennard has proposed a solution that would be the biggestdevelopment the airwaves have seen in decades: opening up the FMspectrum to new, small stations that could serve neighborhood, communityand educational needs. It's a great idea -- for everyone but the bigbroadcasters who own the dial now, and who are lobbying to shut out thecommunities that would benefit from low-power radio.The FCC's proposal would permit newstations of 100 or 1,000 watts, as well as 1- to 10-watt"micro-radio" stations whose broadcast range would covera single neighborhood. The low-power radio (LPR)stations might be non-commercial, and might beexempt from larger stations' service rules, which wouldmake them cheaper to start and operate. Of the fivecommissioners, Kennard and Gloria Tristaniseem firmly in favor of permitting LPR licenses,and Harold Furchtgott-Roth seems firmly against it(he's something of a contrarian libertarian, andhe's clashed with Kennard before.) Michael Powell andSusan Ness are the swing voters, whose statementssuggest that they basically like the idea but haveconcerns about technical issues. The FCC's policy is toinvite public input on its proposals; it's acceptingcomments on this one until June 1. (If you're interested,see the FCC Low-Power FM page.)
A source at the FCC says that they've receivedthousands of public comments already, the vastmajority of them supporting low-power FM.The major exception is, unsurprisingly, thepeople who've got stations already, the NationalAssociation of Broadcasters. The overall number ofAmerican radio station owners has dropped by 1,000 in thepast four years, and four large companies collectivelyown more than 1,000 stations; that's bad for listenerswhose local programming is progressively vanishing tocentralized, syndicated content, but it's good for thebig owners' business. It's no surprise they don't wantto see radio's biodiversity increase. "Our assumption isthat it all comes down to economics, to competition,"says Michael Bracy of the Low Power RadioCoalition, "so they're going to come up with whateverarguments they can to limit the number of competitorsin the marketplace."
A "Low Power FM Kit" sent by the NAB to radio stations in March calls on them to fight the proposal tooth and nail; among other things, it reprints an astonishingly snotty article from Radio Business Report [page 1] [page 2] suggesting that LPR advocates just want to waste precious airspace on music that sounds "like sick cats running over hot coals." But the NAB's main tactic at the moment is framing the fight for listeners' attention as a fight for airspace. The new stations, they claim, would damage the integrity and impede the reception of current broadcasters' signals. That's a curious argument to make. Any new stations that would be eligible for a license couldn't interfere with existing stations anyway -- low-power radio is not the same thing as pirate radio -- and, in fact, part of the point of creating these smaller stations is that they'd fit where larger ones wouldn't. It seems more likely that the NAB is scared of losing market share and ad revenue; the fact that they feel entitled to keep the airwaves all to themselves is exactly why the FCC ought to make more homegrown competition possible.
-- Douglas Wolk
![[page 1]](../NAB/20-RBRclip1.gif){kind=link}
![[page 2]](../NAB/21-RBRclip2.gif){kind=link}