The real honest true deregulation of broadcasting

Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1990 by Lorenzo W. Milam

I REMEMBER WHEN SATELLITES WERE EXOTIC. There were only a few of them, and we would go outside at dusk to watch them rising and setting like so many mini-moons. Now there are thousands of them. Thirty years ago, a political summit meeting could be destroyed because of a "spy plane," the U-2. Satellites have by their proliferation rendered moot the political fear of military eyes and ears.

McLuhan said that information is always liberating. At my favorite bar in Tijuana, The Reno, they watch soccer from Brazil, bullfights from Madrid, the local version of "60 Minutes" from Mexico City, and - from all over - the ever-more-anachronistic wars between Israelis, Arabs, Irish, Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese, Ethiopians, and Afghanis who have yet to hear the message of the thousand setting moons.

Those of us who have a lingering love of radio listen to the Canadian Broadcasting System audio services on the ANIK D satellite (transponders 16, 18, 20, 22 and 24). I prefer 24, because I can watch the Canadian Parliamentary Sessions on television with the audio turned to the subcarrier carrying classical programming. There too is the exquisite programming of the CBC French Service (on transponders 20 and 24). At nine PM, a lady who sounds like a Gallic Passionara comes on and plays the dances from Terpsichore, or the Dichterliebe. Or she will move through time and space to present the music of lava, or French pre-WWII cabaret music, or music of India - all the while speaking in a low throaty voice, as if she is telling us a very funny and very dirty joke.

In the old days, CBC's signal could only reach the northern tier of states. It is no accident that our strongest public radio comes out of Minnesota, Michigan, New York and Wisconsin. The CBC was helping to build the model, starting fifty years ago, and we didn't even have to pay for it. Thus one of the early lessons that communications belong to all of us, no matter for whom it is created.

Now, with satellite, the CBC is a gently falling, non-acidic rain of radio wit, drifting down onto the entire Western Hemisphere. Because of age and training and heritage and history, they always sound more sophisticated, wise, knowing and funny than the dull bulbs in our own- Public Broadcast System. Anyone with a $995 satellite system - and amplifier and speakers - can hear one of the great radio services of the world.

Thirty-five years ago we went into community radio because there was no good broadcasting in the United States. Broadcasting in the United States was not regionalized and free but centralized and commercial. The audience paid a tax to be entertained; the taxes were, and are, called "advertising." Advertising increases the price of products like Excedrin, Froot Loops and most soap products by forty percent.

Some claim that radio died when they decided that the American spectrum could be sold like real estate. That's but part of it. The real problem was that there was no countervailing force to the power of commercial broadcasting until 1940. Typically, the change was technological rather than political: the FCC established "reserved" frequencies for FM and television.

Because of the growth of television, FM was moribund until the early sixties, so strange stations like KPFA, WBAI, KPFK and KRAB had time to prosper - or at least stabilize. They showed that radio could be good, and cheap, and demanding of the listener. They were committed to bias of programs but non-bias of the frequency. This is called Freedom of Speech. KRAB safely nested a member of the john Birch Society on alternative Friday night commentaries with the local leader of the Socialist Workers Party. "Cap" Weinberger, the recent Secretary of Defense, was one of the regular commentators on (the progressive FM network] Pacifica - as were several Marxists.

It wasn't until later that what we were doing came to be called "community" radio. Before that it wasn't community. The early KPFA and KPFK and WBAI and KRAB were stations for the elite those who wanted vigorous discussion, strong commentaries, shit-kicking interviews and rich and controversial musical programming. Later these stations and their followers devolved into lecture halls for social and political minorities.

The final nail in the coffin of Real Radio was put into place by - of all people - me. Jeremy Lansman and I filed RM-2493 ("The Petition Against God") with the Federal Communications Commission in 1974. We asked the Commission to stop issuing licenses for noncommercial FM stations until they determined whether religious propaganda was a bona fide use of the channels set aside for educational purposes. Because of the controversial, didactic nature of the document (written in the style of H. L. Mencken and G. B. Shaw, my heroes) it generated an enormous response. The FCC has received over 30,000,000 pieces of mail on the subject, and the letters and cards are still coming in at the rate of 1,000,000 a year.

It was soon apparent that the government was trapped into giving religious broadcasters something to assuage their fear. (In a participatory democracy, it is impolitic to stonewall paranoia too long.) The government turned over to the religious broadcasters what they considered to be the least valuable resource in the spectrum, the "non-commercial" portion of the FM band. The tragedy of this loss can be heard today in almost every community in America, where oleaginous voices tell us of their bleak god and how much money he needs for his perpetuation.