from: My DD [1]

Meet Hannah Sassaman, Prometheus Radio Project

by Nancy Scola, Fri May 04, 2007 at 08:03:59 PM EST

Can you believe that we're already at the seventh installment in our MyDD interview series called Hearing Progressive Voices? Why, it seems as if it was just yesterday that I was thinking, hey, interviewing interesting progressives via instant messenger would be fun, educational, and -- because IM produces an instant transcript -- easy. I'm particularly pleased to have had the chance to chat today with Hannah Sassaman. Hannah is the Program Director for the Prometheus Radio Project, a Philadelphia-based group that helps set up community radio stations and fights for a media landscape that is more fair, more balanced, and more open to all.

The particular focus of Prometheus' fight these days is Low Power FM -- small, community-based radio stations that have a broadcast range of only a handful of miles. In a day and age where Clear Channel owns more than a thousand radio stations across the country, community radio is a means by which the people can communicate, organize, and effect change. But the future of LPFM in America is not certain. Legislation passed by Congress has restricted low-power stations to small cities and towns, claiming concerns over interference with full-power stations of the sort owned by Clear Channel and other corporate broadcasters. There's a chance in the 110th Congress to re-open the radio spectrum to local broadcasting, and even the rare opportunity this fall to grab full-power licenses for non-profit broadcasters. In this interview, Hannah and I discussed deejay-public feedback loops, untying the hands of the FCC, and Prometheus' pirate radio roots.

Hannah eloquently explains the importance of both Low Power FM and telecom policy that frees at least some lines of communication from corporate control. But me, I think it's summed up well in the words of that bard of my generation, John Mayer: "when they own the information, oh, they can bend it all they want."

Let's start at the beginning. In Low Power FM, we're talking about radio stations with a small reach -- a few miles and 10 or 100 watt transmitters, right? So why is LPFM important?

Low power FM is important for a bunch of reasons -- but the most important one is that these stations are locally owned, by owners who can legally hold just one radio license. The board of directors of the station has to live within a few miles of the transmitter. The station is, for that reason, accountable -- if you don't like something on the air, you can see the chief engineer or the morning talk show program director at church, at the supermarket, chaperoning the school dance. In a consolidated media market -- when Clear Channel, Viacom, Cox, and the other big radio owners own most of the stations in our towns -- we can hear the difference very easily. A low power FM station is a community radio station -- like a community library or a public park.

In 2003, Clear Channel blasted Glen Beck's program all over the country. He was a cheerleader for the war. Clear Channel, which owns almost 1300 radio stations around the US, also owns almost 800,000 billboards and dozens of major arenas. So instead of local debates on America's strongest radio stations about how the war would impact local National Guard troops, businesses, families, and cities, we had our radio stations, our billboards, and our arenas all trumpeting the war. There were pro-war rallies in many Clear Channel owned venues all over the US in 2003.

Low power FM stations and other community radio stations held real debates about the lead up to war, and about so many other issues. One hundred watts covers a neighborhood and a small town -- 100 watts of accountability to that town.

I read recently about a conservative radio host who reports on immigration and local traffic on KFYI in Phoenix. Only thing is, he lives in the San Fernando Valley in California...

Exactly. That's called voice-tracking -- and it's one of the most drastic and noticeable results of media consolidation's amazing acceleration over the past decade. In 1996, Congress passed a huge law governing all the telecommunications ownership rules in the country -- it was called the The Telecommunications Act. That act had huge consequences for local radio. That act allowed corporate station owners to vastly increase their holdings in small towns and across different kinds of media platforms. So to go back to my favorite canary in the coal mine, Clear Channel, before 1996, they owned just 40 stations nationwide. After 1996, they ballooned to almost 1300, all headquartered out of San Antonio, Texas.

So when Clear Channel came into a market they would buy up all the stations in town up to six or eight. Then they'd move the headquarters of all those stations into what they call a 'market cluster.' In Philadelphia, that means a big building on City Line Avenue. Out of that building, you have one administrative staff set, one janitorial staff, one engineering staff, and one programming staff -- all running 6 stations. That means tons of deejays, programmers, and program directors all got fired. Clear Channel makes their deejays work triple-time. One deejay will record the weather, the traffic, and public affairs and news programming for three, four, or five stations.

And they'll adjust their cadences, their local geographic references, to their ideas of the needs of the local town. It's disgusting -- and luckily, noticeable. People have been turning away from that kind of radio in droves, and Clear Channel is starting to notice that terrible radio is not profitable.

What's the feedback loop when you you have a host in one part of the country talking to listeners in another part of the country? I mean, what does he or she really care what listeners think, as long as the corporation is happy?

Great point. Here's a great example In New York City about a year ago, there was a deejay on one of the local hip hop stations -- DJ Star. His station Power 105 FM had a rivalry with Hot 97, another local hip hop station in town. So on his morning talk program DJ Star started to make a bunch of pretty terrible comments about the deejay, which is nothing new.

He then went way too far -- making sexually suggestive and threatening comments against the four year-old of his rival. Now this was terrible enough for the people of NYC. But Clear Channel syndicated that show on 11 other stations -- as far south as South Carolina. So not only were the people of New York forced to listen to a grown man offering a $500 reward to learn from listeners where the daughter of the rival deejay attended school, but so were listeners in Philadelphia, Georgia...

It's good to make those deejays accountable -- and Star was let go for his comments -- but it's like lopping the head off a hydra. As long as Clear Channel can suck profits from their San Antonio headquarters, they don't have to worry about the local community's complaints to stay alive and pump non-accountable programming to us. We started a site -- Hate: The Clear Channel Game --about the structural problem here.

It is indecent that GE, Disney, Cox, Clear Channel, and Time Warner own so much on our airwaves. And that the FCC does not give true muscle to those tools they do have to keep stations accountable -- like license renewals, and license challenges. At the recent media ownership hearing in Tampa, Florida, Commissioner Michael Copps described his own FCC's license renewal system as a 'postcard-stamp process'. In the UK and in other nations, you can't get a radio station without filling out an application tantamount to a huge grant request. We need to force the FCC to give us more tools to stop media consolidation and keep stations accountable in our neighborhoods.

The No Hate Radio site above allowed people to file complaints at the FCC on the license owned in New York City. Which I found a lot more productive than just asking the station to remove the offending deejay and replace him with someone just as bad or worse.

What do you make of the fact that Don Imus said today that he's suing CBS Radio, saying that he gave them exactly what they paid for -- controversy, "irreverence"?

I think it's very interesting to think about the capital relationship inherent in that phrase. Who paid for Imus? The shareholders of CBS. Who will pay for what he actually says? The listeners of the American public struggling, every day, to learn how they can get better health care, how they can learn more about their elected officials besides controversy. It is as if we give Imus and the corporate owners of CBS a payment of our most valuable resources -- our time and our airwaves -- in giving him a national seat to speak. I think that we must stop media consolidation -- but I am very interested in building new outlets, in building community radio stations as a major solution to media consolidation. Especially in rural areas, where the impact of consolidation is so deeply magnified.

I sent you the Gerardo Reyes Chavez testimony about how the Naples, Florida, radio stations didn't broadcast in languages that the tens of thousands of local farm workers could understand. Many of them were left in the fields with no information on how to escape Hurricane Wilma as a result. Consolidation costs lives. Luckily, WCTI-LP--Radio Consciencia, which broadcasts in Zapotec, M’am, and Haitian Creole, as well as Spanish, reached those farm workers, who were able to call into the radio station and talk to actual people rather than a voice-tracked computer. Then WCTI sent vans out to rescue the farm workers from danger. Over 350 people were saved. At a recent media ownership hearing in Harrisburg, the entire first two hours of testimony were filled up with the development directors talking about how wonderful the local corporate, consolidated media was -- helping with Toys for Tots drives, blood drives for the Red Cross. This is deeply important. But not the same as giving a diverse community the information it needs to live.

I can bash Clear Channel all day. I think they've poisoned the American public in order to sell toothpaste. But every time a new low power FM radio station goes on the air, I start to cry. Because it isn't just a new media outlet filled with lots of diverse voices -- it's an organizing center.

I'm here to let you talk, but have you ever seen this quote from Clear Channel Chairman Lowry Mays? "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."

That's Lowry Mays and [Clear Channel Radio CEO] John Hogan for you. They consider themselves the largest outdoor advertising company in the world. That's how they frame themselves to stockholders. But the American people won't stand for it.

It seems like a fight between this model that's happy with the linearity of news, where information only travels one way...

Sure. These stations treat us as consumers. They only open the phones for contests. They don't treat the airwaves as public space that we need to connect with each other.

The Internet is important, but Americans have an average of nine radios in their lives each day -- their clock radio, car radio, at the bank, at work, which means that radio permeates many aspects of their day. If you are a poor person, or a rural person who can likely only get the Internet from a monopoly owner charging exorbitant fees, or a Native American person living on a reservation, where the American government continues to renege on its promise to provide universal phone service, then the radio is it. If we want to win back this nation for bold and challenging progressive values, we cannot ignore those media consumers.

The Center for Rural Strategies -- a longstanding rural community organization in Kentucky -- wrote a great paper all about how the right built radio stations in the midwest for 20 years. When we look at red and blue states, we can see where conservative companies invested in radio. And what they invested in was, in fact, voice-tracked and consolidated radio, run from Calvary Chapel headquarters in California or Idaho. But because everyone else ignored South Dakota, Kansas, and other places, that's all that people had to listen to.

You talk about the importance of radio in much of America. In some parts of Africa, rural radio is sometimes called "Africa's Internet."

I just got back from Kenya, where we built three radio stations with powerful community organizations. One of the favorite groups I met was called Koch FM, in an unofficial/slum community called Korogocho, similar to the more famous Kibera.

Youth in that community outside of Nairobi built a community radio station called Koch FM to deal with a specific community problem -- the growing number of assaults on youth and women. That station not only spread the word about the importance of behaving with respect, but gave kids and many others a chance to make something powerful and to share it with their community. They built their station from the ground up -- from microphone to antenna -- learning job skills and building a family in the meantime.

Clear Channel hasn't made it to Kenya yet?

Media consolidation is alive and kicking in East Africa. There are two major telecom providers -- Safaricom and CelTel. Entire buildings are painted green or red, and plastered with their marquees. You can buy a chicken, a plate of ugali, and a cell phone SIM card or top-up for your prepaid phone on any roadside in Kenya. The radio system is also getting more consolidated -- Capitol FM is the top station in Nairobi. I heard that Beyonce song "To the Left" about 100 times. It sounded just like American radio.

Um, i think it's called "Irreplaceable."

Haha. "Everything you own in a box to the left..."

Kenyan kids need to learn about "go ahead and get gone" too.

Indeed!

We're a bit off topic. What was it that Prometheus was doing in Kenya?

We were invited to bring our barn raising model to Kenya to work with the Kenyan Independent Media Center, and the communications department at one of Kenya's best schools -- Maseno University, west of Kisumu. A barn raising -- taken from the Amish term of neighbors coming together to build a community barn -- is when hundreds of volunteers build an entire, working, permanent radio station over a short time -- usually three days. In Kenya, resources were slightly harder to come by (though I became a really good bargainer on the streets of Nairobi for Coby CD players), so it took longer.

We built one station at the top of Moi stadium, during the World Social Forum, with volunteers from Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. We saw the power of community radio unfold before us when youth from Kangemi, another local unofficial/slum community, challenged the organizers of the WSF to adjust prices and programming to meet their needs. Youth leading that struggle came to the top of the station to be interviewed by new volunteer deejays on a transmitter built by new volunteer engineers broadcasting to the entire forum of 50,000 people. Even when the station was held up by three armed bandits, we decided to keep going, because the community who built it cared so much.

That was a temporary station?

It was temporary at the WSF -- but the collective is still working together and working to put the station up again in Nairobi, for good

What's the process for getting a radio license in Kenya?

It's a little more flexible in the US, where it is almost impossible. But you have to talk to the CCK -- the Kenyan FCC. At Maseno, the university where we built a permanent station, they were in process of getting a license when we worked for three days with students, professors, and community organizers who came west from Nairobi. The station was up and on-air, but the license application was still underway. As consolidation deepens in Kenya and all of East Africa, it's harder and harder to build.

What keeps me up at night is how much I want to go to Somalia to build a station with a women's community center there. Suaad -- a woman who traveled with us al the way from Nairobi to Kisumu after learning what we were going to do there -- kept telling us that now, now, was the time to build. Because there was no government now. And if the station was up by the time a government formed, it would be harder for them to take it down.

Geekcorps (like the Peace Corps, sorta, for geeks) has this model where, in Mali, for example, they connect the people to a local radio station, but they also connect the station to the Internet -- hooking up the people working at the station with a Linux-driven box. The idea there is that people can get the benefit of the global network without necessarily being directly hooked into it.

Interesting. In Kenya, many people used the Internet -- and wanted to -- but it's prohibitively expensive to get access at home -- the equivalent of $300/month for 'Permanent Internet'. There is something we care a lot about at Prometheus: an 'appropriate technology' model.

We brought about 10 donated computers for the trip -- and within a week, most of them were infected with viruses. We had carefully loaded them with open-source audio editing, movie production, layout software, and they all went down. Plus, we didn't have enough of these machines to give to everyone who wanted one. I've never felt so laden, burdened with resources I didn't want. The most sustainable tools we used were the soldering irons, the tape decks, and the analog technology that runs on batteries. These were tools that could be fixed, replicated, and passed on when the fancy resources left with the ugly Americans.

This is something that absolutely disgusted me. We worked closely with an organizer named John Bwakali, a founder of Kenya IMC who also works on youth issues with the United Nations. The cultural producers who make up the IMC and other groups wanted to sell their work, arts, and other products online through eBay. Amazing stuff that sells incredibly cheap in Kenya but would make a good profit to fund the organizing programs -- if they could sell them online. But when John tried to set up an eBay and PayPal account, he was rejected. He actually got a long legal letter from eBay about how they 'don't support Kenya'. Literally and figuratively, right?

It makes me think a lot about how so many free trade products are sold through Western intermediaries -- NGOs. And how our media reform battles must be international so our allies in the global South and beyond can represent themselves on the Internet, and not have to work through us to tell their own stories.

This is a battle that net neutrality activists and the blogosphere should embrace if they want an open dialogue with the entire world. The Geekcorps thing you are describing sounds great. Because even if local people can't get access, they can at least hook into the global community for solidarity purposes.

Yeah, you should check them out. From what I know, they build radio networks from Coke bottles or something.

Ha, awesome, us too! Also cooking fires and pipes.

Which brings up a good question, if I may say so myself. What does it take to build a Low Power FM station? And how much does it cost?

Great question, Nancy! A low power FM radio station is an extremely sustainable and appropriate technology, in the U.S. and around the world. It costs anything from $5000 to $20,000 to start -- one-time costs invested in consoles, the certified transmitter required by the FCC, the Emergency Alert system, etc. You put up the station and you're good to go. You pay $500 a year to the licensing companies if you pay music, and then your electricity bills (very cheap for a transmitter that has the equivalent power of a light bulb at 100 watts). The thing I love the most about LPFM though is that you can build these stations yourself. FM radio is a very well understood technology -- it's been around for 100 years. At Prometheus, when we build stations, the experts in the room don't pick up the tools and solder together the compressor for the station themselves. Instead, they hand the tools to a grandmother, a labor organizer, a seven-year-old and guide them through the process of building the station.

This has two benefits. The locals understand the technology and can keep it running if anything breaks -- very different from commercial radio, where one professional engineering team for Infinity Broadcasting is running eight to 12 stations or more over a 50-mile radius. So, for example, after Hurricane Katrina, on the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf coast, of the 41 stations on the air, lining that coast only four stayed up during and after the storm and two of those four were low power FM radio stations. That's because the local engineers -- all volunteers -- lived in the community and knew the tweaks and turns they had to pull off to keep their lifeline stations going.

One station -- WQRZ, in Bay St. Louis, MS -- was the only station that stayed on air in ground zero for Katrina -- Hancock County. It became so essential for getting news out about water pickups, where missing family members were, etc. that the Emergency Operations Center for the whole county set up shop with the station.

Now benefit number two. The groups build a regional network with other supporters in the area. This means that the people who come together to build a radio station are not just building a station -- they are building a movement. We built a station with PCUN -- the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos de Noroeste -- a powerful farm worker group in the Northwest. Now that they have a station, they are telling other farm worker labor groups that they need to get ready to build.

We've gotten calls from 12 other farm worker organizing groups who want stations -- to organize for workers' rights and voting rights and immigration rights -- because they heard about it from someone they trust.

Reading news coverage of the work that was done to set up Radio KAMP at the Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina, while FEMA, the mayor of Houston, and the governor of Texas were intrigued by the idea, more hands-on officials seemed a bit frightened by the idea that there would be a way of ground-up way of distributing information to the people in the stadium. Is that a fair assessment?

Racism is alive and well in Texas. This is what the folks at the Astrodome said: they wanted us to get 10,000 radios so "people wouldn't fight over the radios". They wanted us to get only radios with earphones because "they didn't want loud rap music to incite violence". Oh, and they wanted the radios to be cheap, "so people wouldn't steal them from each other". This is repulsive, yes?

Even though the communities displaced from New Orleans -- thousands of whom had just come from the Superdome, where so many suffered so much -- could not understand the information they were receiving as it was being delivered over a loudspeaker (can you imagine getting detailed form-filling-out instructions over a stadium loudspeaker?), despite all of this and despite the fact that we had an FCC license, the Astrodome fought it. Still, we succeeded in getting on air. We got the 10,000 radios through donations by Sony and through personal donations to the Houston Independent Media Center, to Pacifica Radio, and to Prometheus from supporters all over the world, as far away as New Zealand and Sweden as well as across the Us.

They wouldn't let us build inside the stadium, so a pair of leather bikers from south Texas donated an airstream trailer. We served many thousands of people during the last weeks of the displacement inside the Astrodome. Many people came up to the station and got on the air to tell their stories of loss and to look for loved ones, to talk about jobs, finding new housing in Houston. I am so proud of the people who worked so hard to make that happen. And I am proud of the FCC -- which understood that there was plenty of room in Houston -- one of America's biggest cities -- to provide this essential service. People are so afraid of communities speaking to each other.

While we're talking FCC, you mentioned the Radio Broadcast Preservation Act of 2000, which called on the FCC to limit LPFM to small cities -- less Philadelphia and more Altoona. If you might divine the motives of Congress for me, what were they thinking with that bill?

Well, let's be honest here. Some of them were concerned that Low Power FM stations, if built in big cities and plugged into the spaces on the FM dial between the smooth jazz, talk radio, and NPR outlets, would interfere with the big broadcasters. And they wanted to see if that was true. They wanted the FCC to commission a study to determine if the FM dial would be wrecked by community radio.

But many of them were thinking, "Wow, we get a lot of airtime on big radio stations, and they seem concerned about this issue." According to the Center for Public Integrity, big broadcaster are some of the largest political donors to campaigns. So while I think that many Congress members had a real concern for the listening integrity of the FM dial, others were a little blinded by the dollar signs.

Luckily, Congress did commission the FCC to study the potential interference of Low Power FM radio. They got the MITRE corporation, a major independent government contractor, to see whether or not Low Power FM could be built in a city with many stations already on the dial -- like Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, New Orleans, or Seattle.

After doing a 2.2 million dollar, comprehensive engineering study, the MITRE corporation found that there was plenty of room for LPFM in big cities as well as the hundreds of small communities where it was already flourishing (like Altoona). MITRE made a recommendation to the FCC that they work to expand Low Power FM -- and the FCC, in turn, took that recommendation to Congress. Now it is up to them to look at the study that they ordered in 2000 and to implement the LPFM service as it was originally designed by the Commission.

Is this ok? Too wonky?

Oh please, wonk out.

The folks who were the architects of the limitation of LPFM were New Mexico's Heather Wilson, and Michigan's John Dingell. Wilson has made some great statements on important media issues like having a free and open Internet, and Dingell has taken great leadership as the new chairman of the House of Representatives' Commerce Committee. Constituents in Albuquerque (Wilson's district) and west of Detroit (Dingell's district) should take a listen to their FM radio and if they want more diverse voices on the dial -- from everybody from the Chamber of Commerce to the local 4-H club to the local AFL-CIO -- and they should tell these folks that now is the time to expand LPFM.

The Senate has been very active on this issue. Senators John McCain, Maria Cantwell, and Patrick Leahy have introduced a bill in both the 108th and the 109th congress, designed to take the FCC's recommendation into consideration and expand LPFM to America's big cities, once and for all. The bill did great last year -- passing out of the Commerce committee 14-7.

Is there a legislative vehicle for yet for expanding LPFM (in the 110th Congress)?

Senators McCain and Cantwell have committed to reintroducing their bill -- last year it was S. 312 -- in the next few weeks.

And we're getting some excitement in the House too. Congressman Mike Doyle, a Democrat from Pennsylvania and the Vice Chair of the Telecommunications Subcommittee in the House, just keynoted a big policy summit in DC on Wednesday where he said he was looking at legislation. He was pretty fired up because a local university in his district -- the Penn State Mckeesport Branch outside of Pittsburgh -- applied for a Low Power FM radio station and had their license application cancelled because of Congress' law. That school has a great Internet radio station -- WMKP "The Roar."

It's the largest student group on campus. They should be able to be on air in their community, as should the many diverse groups who need a voice in Pittsburgh, which has a heavily consolidated media market. We congratulate Congressman Doyle on his leadership -- and people across the city are encouraging him to introduce a bill.

The makeup of the coalition backing the LPFM expansion -- from the Christian Coalition to the Future of Music Coalition -- is similiar to the coalition backing net neutrality, no?

Great point. Low Power FM is far from partisan. Recently, a Christian gospel radio station -- a Low power FM out of Ringgold, Georgia -- went to visit their congressman, Congressman Nathan Deal, a another member of the Telecom Subcommittee. Their station is under threat of being knocked off the air by a Chattanooga Clear Channel station. Jim Price, Sr., a conservative gentleman to be sure, told his congressman how much he supported local, independent media and how deeply WBFC-LP has been embraced by the local community. Nathan Deal told Mr. Price that he wanted to support Low Power FM.

If LPFM is expanded, there will be more places for stations like WBFC to move if they are under threat of being displaced by big broadcasters. We work closely with municipalities, churches, community schools, and a wide variety of groups from all across the political spectrum. Everyone agrees that community radio is an essential part of every city and town. In Georgia, everyone from Albany State University to the Good News Church to Frogtown Community Radio to Fellowship of Holy Hip Hop are on the air. Cities like New Orleans would have room for three or four LPFM stations if Congress gave the FCC back their power to license stations. So we can have folks from all across the political spectrum sharing views and, more importantly, giving access to many stakeholders across the city. This is what the FCC meant when they said their job was to license in the public interest.

That raises what I might suggest is an important point. I'd argue that while telecom policy is both so important and so deadly dull, one thing that's pretty straightforward and compelling is the idea that the radio spectrum is a public resource that belongs to we the people. That idea seems to get a bit battered and bruised in DC.

That's why, to be totally honest, I spend a lot more time listening to how the environmentalists of Portsmouth, New Hampshire and the SEIU organizers of Chicago and the women's literacy workers of the New Mexico Media Literacy project view these issues. I think that in DC there's a little bit of disconnect on how many people still use their airwaves to get information. The airwaves are a medium by which we learn about everything from national policy battles to local emergencies. When we frame the airwaves as a resource people need -- and a resource people are willing to fight for -- we get success. Our strongest lobbyists are the community radio stations -- and those who lost their chances to get stations -- themselves.

How did you get involved with Prometheus? And is Hannah Sassaman your real name?

Hannah Sassaman is my real name. I had one chance -- and one chance only -- to take on a pirate radio name, right when I started here at Prometheus fresh from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. For years, I worked as a bartender at an amazing and famous local Eritrean restaurant to supplement my work in the Methodist Church basement Prometheus calls its home. I learned a little Amharic and Tegrinia and became a devotee of a great chickpea dish -- shuro watt. I tried signing emails with that for awhile. It didn't stick sadly.

Shuro Watt?

Yes, that was to be my pirate radio name. Now we have an Oromo (Oromo being a people who live in the western part of Ethiopia) organizer working with us -- Siyade Gemechisa -- and she knows that dish very well . She thinks that name is hilarious. As Prometheus started as a group of pirates, working with Radio Mutiny here in Philadelphia. Though we are no longer pirates now.

I came to Prometheus after getting active around the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000. I was very angry at how the community groups fighting that event -- really not something that the Democratic machine town of Philly would ever embrace -- were covered on the local news. I started producing radio plays for Prometheus and then took on their Clear Channel campaign. We organized a huge rally against Clear Channel, Fox, and NBC, and I started doing national organizing in Seattle, San Antonio, Rapid City, SD, Nashville, and beyond, after that. The rest is history.

Shuro watt is really tasty. It's like this spicy pureed chickpea dish. Does my name sound like a fake name?

Nah, but I was reading last night about how Prometheus' "Director of Electromagnatism" is named Pete Tridish [say it aloud].

Petri is amazing. He helped found Radio Mutiny with 70 other programmers. At its height, there were Jamaican ministers, anarchists, and older folks on the air in West Philadelphia from a tiny studio in the back of his house. One of our board members, Diane Myers, called herself "The Condom Lady" and produced a show about sex health education, interspersed with Prog Rock. So you'd get a bit of Captain Beefheart, then "Dental Dams: Fact or Fiction?"

When one woman, an Ethiopian journalist who had moved to Philadelphia (West Philly is a big immigrant community), started getting trained on the air and people were really excited. But she never showed up for her first session on the radio. Folks called her -- asking if she was ok, they hadn't heard from her. She professed her love for the station and how excited she was to start getting ready to program news about the continuing conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia to many local immigrants, but she decided to not come back because she was afraid that if the police came to the station while she was there, she'd lose her legal immigration status. That made us angry. And we decided that community radio needed to come out of the closet.

There was ample room for the five-watt Radio Mutiny on Philadelphia's airwaves. And no one should be threatened with fines, jail time, loss of property and more for using those airwaves. So with a large coalition of strange bedfellows -- the United Conference of Catholic Bishops, 22 cities in Michigan, and many radio pirates, and so many more folks -- we fought for, and won, the Low Power FM radio service at the FCC.

To tie it all together: the LPFM service was started under Bill Kennard, the FCC Chairman under Clinton. Bill went to South Africa to help them start up their telecom regulatory service. One of his visits was to a community radio station outside of Johannesburg -- Bush Radio -- run by Zane Ibrahim. Kennard was supposed to spend 1/2 hour at Bush Radio. He spent 4 hours learning how community organizers worked to put entrepreneurial programming, women's programming, and elders' programming, on the air in the years after the end of apartheid. Zane said: community radio is 10% radio and 90% community. Kennard came back and founded LPFM.

Before Kennard, there was something called 'Class D,' which was a tiny educational radio service used by universities primarily. One watt stations, things like that. But there wasn't LPFM -- absolutely no way for a community to get a station, besides buying it on the open market for millions of dollars.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals. But things didn't end so well -- what with him having his regenerating liver pecked out by a bird. Do things look a bit better for you guys?

They do. We not only have the best chance in years to expand Low Power FM radio with leaders like Congressman Markey, Congressman Doyle, and Senators McCain, Leahy, and Cantwell leading the way, but this fall the FCC is going to give out the last Full Power FM non-commercial radio stations they will probably ever distribute. This is the first time in a generation that community groups will get to apply for juggernaut licenses -- up to 100,000 watts -- in communities across the country. There's more room in rural areas, but surprising open slots in big cities, too. You can visit Get Radio to see if there is a potential available frequency in your city or town and Radio for People or Prometheus Radio Project to get all the info you need to get ready to apply with your community organization -- non-profits only.

The window opens October 12th, for 7 days only -- so now is the time to get ready to apply, and to join thousands of progressives and community organizations in taking back the FM dial. A group will have to get $3,000 to $5,000 together to pay for the engineering necessary to apply for the full power FM license -- you have to give the commission an engineering study that proves there's plenty of room for an full power station in your neck of hate woods. Then you have at least three years to fund raise for the rest.

Full Power FM is a bit more expensive than LPFM, but you can build a full power station for $20k or pay up to $200k, depending on your taste in equipment and what kind of staff you want to hire. But some of the strongest full power community radio stations are run by mostly volunteers -- KGNU in Boulder, WERU in Maine, and WMNF in Tampa are great examples. As they became absolutely indispensable to their communities as the go-to places for diverse, independent news, music, and culture they built membership programs to raise their budgets -- and to hire staff and expand their effectiveness. I get so excited when I think about this wonderful, rare chance to build institutions -- progressive, open institutions -- for our kids and grandkids.