In low-power FM fight, who’s more local?
Originally published in Current, April 8, 2002
By Mike JanssenGrassroots advocates of the FCC's fledgling low-power FM radio service are casting themselves as impromptu guardians of the gates, struggling to hold the new variety of noncommercial radio to its original mission of local service to underserved communities.
The advocates, led by a group of politically progressive nonprofits, say a handful of applicants has run afoul of the FCC's LPFM rules promoting local service. The largest group so accused, a nationwide aggregate of Calvary Chapel affiliates, has applied for about 150 stations. But the churches say their roots are as grassy and local as anyone's.
LPFM guidelines require a station to have an established local presence in its community and, if it is a chapter of a national organization, to articulate a local mission. But Andrea Cano, director of the Microradio Implementation Project, estimates that as many as a third of the applications for LPFMs filed with the FCC break those and other rules.
Some broadcasters, such as Calvary, submitted similarly worded declarations of their local mission even when located in different cities. Others made inflated claims of a local presence. So Cano and like-minded LPFM advocates have launched a battle on paper to deny licenses to applicants and free spectrum for other broadcasters.
"This is a new service," says Cano, whose group is a division of the United Church of Christ and is funded by the Ford Foundation. "The FCC is still working out the kinks, and the process left a lot of things a little bit arbitrary and fuzzy. People have bent over backwards to take advantage of the fuzziness."
The FCC created the noncommercial LPFM service two years ago to foster a new wave of stations focused on community service. Then-Chairman William Kennard, a Democrat who enthusiastically pushed LPFM, said it would "throw open the doors of opportunity to the smaller, community-oriented broadcaster."
Today, Kennard is gone, and Republican Michael Powell chairs the FCC, prompting fears among low-power advocates that the commission's commitment to LPFM could dry up. As broadcast licenses begin trickling out to stations, they worry that Washington will forget the service's distinctly local nature.
So far, the FCC has licensed just 11 100-watt stations for broadcast. It also has issued 266 construction permits, which give applicants 18 months to build their stations, get licenses and start broadcasting. That leaves more than 3,100 applications to process. At least two-thirds of those hopefuls will not get channels, according to FCC estimates.
The competition is sharpened by a congressional decision to protect existing FM stations from new interference, which limited spaces for low-power frequencies and may have cut the number of potential LPFM stations by 80 percent.
Cano and fellow advocates are capitalizing on the slow pace of processing and are pushing hard to hold LPFM to Kennard's promise of bolstering local service. In recent months they have urged the agency to reject dozens of applications that they say betray weak commitments to locally focused programming. If their informal objections sway the FCC, they could help determine what listeners will hear on low-power stations in the future.
An example of the kind of low-power station they support launched in February in the tiny town of Deale, Md. WRYR, "We Are Your Radio," belongs to the South Arundel Citizens for Responsible Development, a group of environmental activists. The majority of the station's programs will be produced locally and feature local birdwatchers, gardeners, Chesapeake Bay watermen, politicians and musicians. The Prometheus Radio Project, another low-power advocacy group, was on hand to offer technical advice and teach classes about starting LPFM stations.
Calvary Chapels: 300 stations and growing?
Across the country, a station with a much different vision is coming together. Ted Ethridge, an assistant pastor at a Calvary Chapel affiliate in Bozeman, Mont., is working on his own low-power station. It will air local programs, such as Bible classes taught at his church. But he would also take shows from the Calvary Satellite Network, a nationally syndicated religious broadcast already airing full-time on a translator near Bozeman and on more than 300 other transmitters around the country. [Map of chapels on Calvary Chapel website.]
"A lot of the content that is on that station, we would air," he says.
Many full-power noncommercial broadcasters know of Calvary Chapel. The widespread religious movement has aggressively filed for full-power FM stations and translators to air satellite-fed religious music and teachings from Calvary's network, a service produced by a Calvary Chapel in Idaho and one in California.
About 11 Calvary Chapels have received low-power construction permits so far.
In filings on behalf of Cano and Prometheus, the National Lawyers Guild Center for Democratic Communications has accused Calvary Chapels of being chapters of a national organization and demanded that they explain how the chapels' stations will serve local communities.
Some Calvary applications use near-identical language to explain their mission, saying they will rebroadcast local Bible classes to address "learning how to live in the society of today."
"None of these Calvary Chapels have discussed how they're going to serve their local community in a way that we think meets the FCC's criteria for why the service is created," says Alan Korn, litigation director of the Center for Democratic Communications, which has filed more than 60 informal objections against Calvary Chapel affiliates.
In a filing against an application from Calvary Chapel Black Hills (CCBH) in South Dakota, CDC wrote, "[T]here can be little doubt but that CCBH's application was filed at the behest of Calvary Chapel radio 'headquarters' . . . in order to expand the Calvary Satellite Network to include broadcasts over as many as 150 newly affiliated LPFM stations."
Calvary Chapel affiliates have fought the secular LPFM advocates by trying to make a case for their local services. Attorney Eric Kravetz, who helped about 100 Calvary Chapels file for LFPM licenses, responds that the CDC's allegations are unfounded, and that the Chapels will indeed provide a uniquely local service.
Issues such as alcoholism, drug abuse, and broken marriages "cannot be addressed only by the programming available on a national basis, although such presentations can be quite valuable," Kravetz wrote in response, paraphrasing a CCBH pastor. "Rather, each community has its own variation of these issues, and any person or organization that helps people deal with these issues must do so on the local level, working with individuals or groups within the community."
In helping the Chapels apply, Kravetz provided them with several boilerplate declarations of local mission, and he acknowledges that some changed them little before using them.
The FCC responds only that it awards licenses based on its rules, and that objections allow observers to police the licensing process — which is exactly what Korn, Cano and others hope they will be able to do.
"This is really a justice issue," Cano says. "We work really hard to have this service come about. To see a lot of this falling through the cracks, we feel a certain responsibility to make sure that this is done well."
To Current's home page Earlier news: FCC okays LPFM service, January 2000. Outside links: Microradio Implementation Project, Prometheus Radio Project, Calvary Chapel, FCC's LPFM page
Web page posted April 10, 2002
Current
The newspaper about public television and radio
in the United States
A service of Current Publishing Committee, Takoma Park, Md.
E-mail: webcurrent.org
301-270-7240
Copyright 2002
