Ah the ironies of free speech. After years of struggle by leftwing outlaw radio stations like Radio Free Berkeley, the FCC finally approves a system of low-power spectrum stations.
And it turns out over half the applicants for them are religious stations.
And who is opposing the FCC decision to create the stations. The rapid Right politicians serving big Media corporations.
Story from the NY Times: -----
July 11, 2000 Religious Groups Are Pushing Hard to Go on the Air With Low-Power Radio Stations
By DAVID LEONHARDT
For months, Republicans in Congress have sought to block a Federal
Communications Commission program to license hundreds of new low-power
radio stations. But now the first batch of applications for the stations
has come in, and it turns out that about half are from religious
organizations, mostly the sorts of fundamentalist churches active in
conservative Republican politics.
>From Horizon Christian Fellowship in San Diego to In His Image Outreach
Ministries in East Greenwich, R.I., hundreds of evangelical churches are
asking for space on the airwaves to spread the Gospel. Some simply want to
read Scripture verbatim; others want to preach against abortion.
They will not get the chance, however, if the Republican Congressional leadership -- lined up on the side of big broadcasting companies and their lobbying group -- gets its way. And that has left many of the applicants and their supporters frustrated, while offering a fresh reminder of the divisions that persist in the Republican Party.
"It looks like money's talking, maybe at the expense of what would be logical long term -- the Republicans supporting their supporters," said Rich Cizik, director of the Washington office of the National Association of Evangelicals, which has 4,300 churches as members.
Congressional Republicans say their position is based on the interference that broadcasters insist the new stations would cause for the signals of existing stations. Politics, they add, will not change that. The House has already passed a bill that would sharply reduce the number of low-power stations, and the Senate is considering similar measures; the White House opposes those efforts.
"The issue goes back to interference, and that's pretty nonideological," said Representative Michael G. Oxley of Ohio. "You're either interfering, or you're not."
Although Congressional staffers, F.C.C. officials and lobbyists said they expected churches to apply for licenses, the makeup of the applicant pool has caught most of them by surprise, they said.
The applications offer the latest twist in a debate that radio executives and media activists consider one of the industry's most important issues since the advent of FM in the 1960's. William E. Kennard, the F.C.C. chairman, has said that adding hundreds of low-power radio stations is one of his top priorities -- a key way to counteract the increasing consolidation of the industry into the hands of a relatively few big profit-minded broadcasters.
He plans to award 1,000 licenses for stations that could be heard within three and a half miles of their signal. The first could be on the air before the end of the year.
Radio executives and some Republicans in Congress have said that Mr. Kennard failed to consult others before devising a plan that would seriously hurt existing broadcasters. "Chairman Kennard, wanting this as his legacy, pushed this issue before it was fully and completely tested," said Representative Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican who is the chairman of the House subcommittee that drafted the legislation.
Mr. Kennard has called the interference claims "a smokescreen" and simply an attempt to protect existing broadcasters.
Over all, about 750 groups applied for about 200 licenses in California, Maryland and eight other states that the commission declared eligible for the first low-power radio. Officials are reviewing the initial applications; over the next year and a half, the F.C.C. will examine the hundreds expected to come in from the remaining 40 states.
Now commission officials and other, mostly liberal supporters of low-power radio in Washington find themselves in the unusual position of hoping the grass-roots religious conservatives will band together to lobby their usually dependable allies in Congress on the issue.
>From the start, the battle over low-power radio has made for odd
bedfellows. National Public Radio has teamed up with the National
Association of Broadcasters -- among the most influential trade groups in
the country -- because both feared that the new stations could create
interference with existing stations' signals and take away listeners. That
position has also been adopted by the National Religious Broadcasters
Association, whose members own established radio and television stations.
Nonprofit evangelical groups applying for the new stations are now offering the same arguments as liberal activists who believe ownership of the airwaves has become concentrated in too few corporate hands.
And Representative Oxley finds himself at odds with grass-roots religious conservatives, who just last month were praising him for helping prevent the F.C.C. from restricting what noncommercial religious television stations could broadcast.
"There is a widespread belief that commercial broadcasters have abandoned their communities," said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, the president of Media Access Project, a Washington law firm that analyzed the list of applicants and has helped groups apply for low-power stations. "This does not break down on a liberal-conservative basis."
To be sure, the 750 applicants include many groups that have no ties to a religious organization. The list, restricted to nonprofit groups, contains schools, local governments and community organizations.
Among the applicants are the National Jazz Hall of Fame Foundation; Freemont High School in Oakland, Calif.; the Maine Science and Technology Museum; the Chamber of Commerce in Baker, La.; the Maryland Mass Transit Administration; a racing pigeon club in Tulsa, Okla.; and a Native American tribe in Sitka, Alaska, that wants to broadcast whale songs from underwater.
But about half of the applicants are churches, and more than half of those are fundamentalist or evangelical churches, according to the Media Access Project.
A number of other applicants, while not churches, share views associated with religious conservatives. One such applicant is the Crisis Pregnancy Help Center in Slidell, La., which tries to convince teenagers to abstain from premarital sex and, if the girls do get pregnant, not to have an abortion. "We see this as a tool to be able to get our message out," said Cindy Collins, the center's founder.
Another applicant, the Calvary Chapel in Oxnard, Calif., is a nondenominational church that teaches the Bible verse by verse. Eric Robbins, the chapel's business manager, said it would offer an alternative to the commercial radio stations in central California; members of Congress, he said, are listening too closely to lobbyists from the companies that own those stations.
"There's some protectionism going on there," Mr. Robbins said.
The National Association of Broadcasters has a lengthy, successful record of promoting legislation its members support. It has also made campaign contributions to most of the key opponents of low-power radio in the last two years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Congressional Republicans' position offers the latest piece of evidence that many strategists want the party to have more distance from the religious right than it did just a few years ago, analysts said. "The Republican Party has realized it is a political party and not a political movement," said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant.
The House began its assault on the low-power radio plan earlier this year, overwhelmingly passing a bill that would probably bar about 800 of the 1,000 licenses that the commission plans to grant. In recent weeks, Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, has been trying to attach an even more restrictive proposal, which would cancel the program, to a number of appropriations bills, Congressional aides said. Senator John McCain has proposed allowing the commission to grant the licenses but give existing broadcasters the right to file complaints about interference in federal court.
Because the low-power radio plan is already law, Congress is expected to move quickly to head it off before the commission grants any licenses. White House officials have said they support the creation of low-power radio stations, as has Vice President Al Gore. Gov. George W. Bush of Texas has not taken a public position on the issue, said Mindy Tucker, a spokeswoman for his presidential campaign.