Andrea Vargas wants you to be able to start a radio station.
Vargas runs the Microradio Implementation Project, a
spanking-new national advocacy group based in Southwest
Portland that aims to help community and religious organizations
across the country obtain licenses for so-called "low-power"
FM stations. Such stations would reach small chunks of
geography but, in Vargas' view, give a huge boost to grass-roots
groups.
Vargas' group was founded in February by the United Church
of Christ, a left-leaning Protestant denomination. She
sees a future in which ethnic minority groups, churches,
human-rights advocates and other community organizers
share slices of the airwaves, providing a civic-minded
alternative to commercial broadcasting.
"We're not getting people into the radio business, really,"
Vargas says. "We're getting them into the community-building
business."
The Federal Communications Commission, Uncle Sam's czar
of the airwaves, gave Vargas her opening for social change
in January, when it decided to allow small nonprofit stations
reaching areas no bigger than 3 1/2 miles.
The plan, however, has one large flaw: Big commercial
broadcasters and National Public Radio aren't hot on the
idea. They've enlisted Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, nine other
U.S. senators and 140 members of the House of Representatives,
including Oregon Republican and Hood River radio station
owner Greg Walden, in an effort to kill low-power radio
in the cradle. Last week, the House Commerce Committee
passed a bill that, according to the FCC, would keep about
75 percent of low-power hopefuls out of the game. Similar
legislation is pending in the Senate.
The push against low-power has sparked a practically
unprecedented public pissing match, with the National
Association of Broadcast-ers on one side, the FCC and
media-access activists like Vargas on the other.
The NAB, commercial broadcasters' trade association,
claims low-power stations would cause enough interference
to leave many established FM stations unlistenable, and
the group has trumpeted its own research to back the claim.
The FCC says the NAB is lying.
While broadcasters and the feds spar over channel adjacency,
modulation, subcarriers and the like, what really seems
to be at work is a clash of worldviews. Massive consolidation
in the '80s and '90s has left the majority of commercial
radio stations in a few corporate hands. The FCC, under
the leadership of Clinton-appointed chairman William E.
Kennard, has reversed decades of policy in an effort to
diversify the airwaves. Activists like Vargas applaud;
the NAB and its members don't see the point.
"These stations would maybe have some value in
some instances, but in general low-power isn't necessary,"
says Bill Johnstone, spokesman for the Oregon Association
of Broadcasters in Eugene. "There are frequencies available
if people want to start radio stations."
Of course, starting a full-power radio station--even
a noncommercial one--requires far more capital than many
nonprofit community groups can muster. But low-power stations,
in the estimate of one long-time engineer, could cost
as little as $5,000 to start, a price tag that's attracted
the notice of a diverse array of groups.
In Portland, the Muslim Educational Trust hopes to broadcast
community news and instructional programming in four languages.
Vietnamese community leaders want to use the airwaves
to stoke participation in elections and other civic affairs.
This sort of low-profile grassroots work falls outside
the traditional role of NPR and its affiliates like Oregon
Public Broadcasting. Public broadcasters take a more nuanced
approach to the low-power issue than their commercial
cousins, emphasizing concerns over interference with radio
reading services for the blind and other established public-service
programming.
"It's important for us to see those audiences served,
and people have the right to form their own stations,
as long as they comply with the rules that are in effect,"
says OPB spokesman Ken DuBois. "It's not the kind of battle
we'd really engage in that much. It's not like we're going
to be bumped off the air."
Despite such conciliatory words, public broadcasters
in general remain opposed to the FCC's current low-power
plan, and it's their arguments that have apparently prompted
Wyden, a Democrat, to join ultraconservative Republicans
like Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm and Pete Domenici in cosponsoring
the anti-low-power bill in the Senate.
"We are concerned that one or more of the proposed classes
of low-power FM stations would supplant translator service
by existing public radio stations," Wyden writes in a
letter he and Gordon Smith, Oregon's Republican senator,
sent to Kennard last July. Wyden wasn't available for
comment, but staffers say the senator's position has not
changed much since last summer.
For her part, Vargas notes that it's far easier to kill
congressional legislation than get it passed; she hopes
pro-low-power voices will rise to the surface as the debate
moves forward. Meanwhile, she plans to keep aiding groups
around the country interested in low-power FM.
"My dream would be to hear Garrison Keillor describe
the arrival of low-power radio in Lake Wobegon," she says.
"That would be the perfect ending."
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 12,
2000
