این فصل را با ذکر تمام تیترهایش (تاکید میکنم تمام تیترهایش) به انگلیسی روان خلاصه کن   : 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 

The Battle Over Low-Power FM in the United States
HANNAH SASSA m AN AND p ETE TRIDISH , Prometheus Radio Project, United States



MEDIA REFORM STRATEGY 

Five lessons learned from the ﬁght for low-power FM (LPFM) radio in the United States: (1) Nothing beats a passionate grassroots eﬀort. Even though Prometheus was a tiny outﬁt working out of a two-room church basement, we were able to harness the power of people who felt robbed of the community radio they needed.
(2)	Local voices with meaningful stories will be heard. We encouraged people to share detailed, personal stories with legislators about how their community could use a radio station. In crowded Washington, DC, with big corporate media lob- byists shaking hands and sharing meals with our elected representatives, we found that stories about local issues spoke louder than the richest broadcasters in the world. (3) Change takes time. It took our grassroots eﬀorts ten years to get a propublic interest correction through, so choose your issues wisely. (4) Focus on the long term. The industry always has its insider advantages in the short term. Choose campaigns that will keep on making a diﬀerence in the long term, and stick with them long enough to win them. (5) Community-building events strengthen movements for the long haul. If we can come together outside of campaign work—outside of calling Congress, signing petitions, taking action— we will build a more permanent understanding of the lines that divide us and keep big media strong.

In the mid-1990s, the movement for media reform in the United States was at a low ebb. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 moved through Congress with


the fawning support of the corporate deregulatory agenda of both parties. Americans started to feel the eﬀect within months, with hundreds of mergers and buyouts by big media corporations leading to waves of ﬁrings and loss of vital local programming.
In response, hundreds of small bands of activists started unlicensed, or pirate, FM radio stations, in hopes of recapturing a sliver of the public air- waves for their communities. Their goal? To give voice to those being silenced by the commercial media. We saw that whether we were ﬁghting for housing reform, an AIDS cure, peace, the environment, or anything else, a small number of corporations had a chokehold on the public’s information and were using their media properties to narrow the contours of debate and the imagination about possible solutions. We took our inspiration from Mbanna Kantako, a blind DJ in a housing project in Illinois who started a tenants’ rights radio station; and Stephen Dunifer, a peace activist and engineer who ran an antiwar radio station out of a backpack from the hills in Berkeley, California. In Dunifer’s case, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tried and failed for four years to get the courts to issue an injunction against his broadcasts. Eventually, his station was shut down in 1998, but not before close to one thousand pirate radio stations had started up in the shadow of the legal whirlpool caused by his (almost successful) case against the system of broadcast laws.
The FCC’s response to the unlicensed stations was twofold. First, the enforcement branch pursued ﬁnes, equipment conﬁscations, and injunctions against radio pirates. The legal confusion created by the Dunifer case created a situation much like the historic (and mythic) Wild West in the United States: the rule of law was temporarily in question as the courts reevaluated the FCC’s performance in distributing radio licenses fairly. In the vacuum of authority that followed, freewheeling radio pirates, from immigrants to anarchists to art- ists, broadcast voices that had never been heard in the mainstream. Second, FCC Chairman William Kennard, who expressed concern about the trend toward radio industry consolidation and loss of diversity of ownership, engaged the pirates to create a new, licensed, hyper-local community radio service for the country: low-power FM radio.
Former radio pirates formed a national group, the Prometheus Radio Proj- ect, to help steer the political debate around the new licenses, and to assist groups technically and organizationally that wanted to give voice to their communities using radio. With Kennard’s leadership, the FCC designed the LPFM service and opened the door for thousands of community groups to apply for licenses.
The battle with big broadcasting was far from over, however, as incumbents pushed Congress to pass an anti-LPFM bill in late 2000 that limited the FCC’s authority to grant the licenses, adding onerous restrictions that kept LPFM out of most of America’s big cities. Prometheus led a coalition in a ten-year eﬀort
 
to restore FCC authority over community radio, and to allow community radio stations into the cities. This eﬀort was ﬁnally successful when Congress passed the Local Community Radio Act, signed by President Obama in Janu- ary 2011.

THE PR OMETHEUS RADIO PR OJECT 
The campaign to expand low-power FM was a transformative one for the Pro- metheans who took it on. Prometheus’s founders had experience organizing demonstrations and direct actions against the City of Philadelphia, against national Republicans setting up shop in town for the Republican National Convention, as well as for many other local struggles. But we’d never had the impact to change federal regulations before, or pass laws through Congress. We weren’t really big league enough to take on the Federal government, and the Feds weren’t quite ready for us either.
When thousands of LPFM applicants were denied their chance to get a com- munity radio license, we saw a constituency spread across the country. But this constituency was made up of people very unlike each other: people who wanted to have radio stations for very diﬀerent reasons. From two rooms in a West Philadelphia church basement, and from the back of an old car that had seen better days, we met the thousands who had lost their opportunity for their dream of building a community radio station including evangelical Christians in Merritt Island, Florida; Latino labor coalitions in Indianapolis; anarchists in Philadelphia; and the black Chamber of Commerce in Sacramento.
We developed a practice of deep conversation with all sorts of people about the unmet communications needs of their communities, and let their passion lead us. We listened to each group as they described why they wanted to be on the air, and helped them to respect the reasons provided by thousands of oth- ers. We needed to meet people where they were and to amplify to decision- makers the individual reasons why people wanted stations. One thing that helped us cross ideological lines was our emphasis on localism. In the wake of the wave of corporate mergers, many people had lost the traditional connec- tion that they had with local radio. More and more of the program content was nationally syndicated, and radio hosts—from the Left or the Right—became more distant and unapproachable and less connected to the particular town that the signal was covering. Our belief was that just like you don’t just have a president—you also have a governor and a mayor and a school board mem- ber—you need a media that has a mix of scales too. There is nothing wrong with having national media outlets, but some room on the dial needs to be reserved for smaller, local voices. This resonated for everyone, including Republicans who have often argued against the over-extension of federal pow- ers. Libertarian Congress members, like Ron Paul of Texas, wanted to hear from local people who wanted the freedom to have their voice on the air, without
 
government or corporate intervention. Left-leaning Congress members, like Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, wanted to hear about locals missing the diversity of local radio and the viewpoints of marginalized groups. Members of the Con- gressional Black Caucus and Congress members supporting immigrant voices wanted to hear about chances for minority nonproﬁts and businesses to share powerful stories, and to put power in the hands of marginalized groups to orga- nize for themselves. Coming from a history where the FCC only considered comments from lawyers in the rulemaking process, and tossed comments from the public in the wastepaper basket, this strategy seemed unorthodox. Treating individual voices like unique ﬂowers and delivering those ﬂowers to Congress members one, two, three at a time? No way.
But we saw our methods start to work and change minds, one at a time, in Congress. In 2007, after a number of false starts in the House led by Democratic legislators without Republican backing and after a dogged bipartisan Senate team failed to push through big broadcaster opposition to LPFM expansion, Congressman Mike Doyle and his passionate legislative aide Kenneth Degraﬀ approached us. They said that they had worked before with conservative Omaha, Nebraska, Congressman Lee Terry, and if we could demonstrate that there was powerful interest in LPFM in Omaha, he would have the wherewithal to stand up to the big broadcasters and cosponsor a bill to expand LPFM radio in the committee where it mattered the most.
We went deep in Omaha. We found applicants from African-American community organizations, local churches, and the YMCA who had wanted a radio station but who had lost out when Congress limited the LPFM service. In Omaha, the voices of these leaders meant a lot to Congressman Terry. He agreed to cosponsor the bill, and we had a bill to expand LPFM that was viable. Once we saw this formula work, we just kept the turntable spinning with local variations on the same theme. We refreshed and maintained connections with new and former LPFM applicants at community radio station “barnrais- ings”—an event taken from the Amish tradition of communities coming together to build a barn in a day or two—where we build an entire LPFM radio station over the weekend. We moved through legislative cycles, getting a little further each time. Each breakthrough with a legislator was a small, nour- ishing victory that allowed us to keep going. Our allies in the Senate patiently moved the bill forward each session until they reached a ceiling and then we would try again. As the years went by, our “DC drag” got threadbare and sometimes our spirits did too. We got tired and angry when allies described our campaign as “low-hanging fruit” in the ﬁght for media reform. We got exhausted explaining why National Public Radio and the big, conservative, commercial broadcasters at the National Association of Broadcasters were
working together to kill our little stations.
We hit something of a turning point in 2005. When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts and other parts of the Gulf,
 
communications systems broke down for millions. Of the forty-two radio stations lining the Gulf coast, only four mostly stayed on the air during the storm—and two of those were LPFM radio stations. WQRZ-LP in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, was so important for helping the Hancock County resi- dents ﬁnd shelter, family members, and resources that the local emergency services agencies invited them to set up shop with them and broadcast hyper- local emergency information along with the Zydeco and other local music that comforted survivors’ frayed nerves.
Telling that story expanded our coalition further, bringing in emergency services leaders together with civil rights, social justice, libertarian, and right- and-left religious organizations all pushing for LPFM radio. After the wave of new Congress members in 2008, we were able to move bills through the House and Senate much more quickly. But we were working against time, as well. While 91.5 percent of Americans continued to rely on radio at least once every week (Radio Advertising Bureau 2014) LPFM advocates increasingly had to contend with statements like “Doesn’t everyone have an iPhone now?” and “Why does radio matter?” We continued to get hundreds of calls a week from radio hopefuls including speakers of Hmong and Haitian Creole, students and seniors, pastors and parents. We knew however that our time was running out with Congress increasingly interested in shiny new things.
By December 2010, the campaign for LPFM had reached a make-or-break junction. We were burning out as a result of years of hitting our heads against intractable opponents and a do-nothing Congress. We were just days from the end of the legislative session, and if we did not pass our bill through the Senate, we would have to start from scratch in the new year. Our bill had passed the House, and passed the appropriate communications-focused subcommittee and committee in the Senate. It was up for “unanimous consent” in the Senate.
Our opponents at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), led by former Republican Senator Gordon Smith, were stopping our bill using a series of anonymous holds by Senators in red states. In order to break a hold like this, we had to discover who was behind it, then mobilize constituents, create public pressure and local press stories in the state until the Senators’ staﬀ buckled and released the hold.
We had little time to act—maybe two weeks before legislators went home for Christmas and closed all pending bills, which would have to be rebooted from scratch the next session. Experienced lobbyists advised us that we were better oﬀ hanging it up and trying again next session. We needed to turn up the pressure. This was very divisive in our group. Some of us felt we would lose all the legitimacy we had built up if we made fools of ourselves for nothing. But what was all that legitimacy for anyway, if we didn’t win?
Danielle Chynoweth, the leader who had built WRFN-LP in Urbana, Illi- nois, and a seasoned campaigner who joined our team for the last years of the
 
campaign, came up with the idea of a hula hoop demonstration. We called our friends who could juggle, do ﬂips and splits, and were willing to “clown around” to help create a makeshift circus in front of the NAB’s national head- quarters. Our goal was to bring attention to the circus the NAB was making out of American democracy with their dirty Senate procedural tricks and insider string-pulling. Our slogan was “Stop making low-power FM radio jump through so many hoops!” (see Figure 14–1).
The demonstration was a success. The NAB locked their front doors, letting no one in or out of the building for an hour, clearly concerned that we might take over their lobby with our hooping. We got a ton of press, and thousands of people watched a three-minute video we made of the event. The decisive story was an article in Politico (Martinez 2010). The reporter not only inter- viewed us and the NAB, but also other organizations that were having similar issues with the NAB at the same time, such as the cable industry and the music licensing industry. They echoed our claim that the NAB was using dirty politi- cal tricks—a move that deﬁnitely helped our cause.
The NAB surrendered two days later, and on January 6, 2011, President Obama signed the bill that would expand community radio to thousands of communities nationwide. The bill lifted the restrictions that made it impossible to apply for licenses in cities, making it possible that most moderate-sized cities would have at least four or ﬁve channels available, and even the densest markets (like here in Philadelphia) would have one or two. It was one of the biggest victories for media reform in a generation, passing new regulations and a bill through Congress that will lead to thousands of new media outlets in the hands of ordinary people around the country.
Keep it tuned to your radio dial. Looking forward to another generation of struggle.


FIGURE 14-1. LPFM activists demonstrating outside of the National Association of Broadcasters.
 
LESSONS LEARNED 
Five lessons we learned from the ﬁght for LPFM radio in the United States:

1.	There’s no replacement for a passionate grassroots eﬀort that wants to build something. Even though Prometheus was a tiny outﬁt working out of a two-room church basement, we were able to harness the power of people who felt robbed of the community radio they needed.
2.	Local voices with meaningful stories will be heard. We encouraged people to share detailed, speciﬁc, personal stories with legislators about how their community could use a radio station. In a crowded Washing- ton DC, with big corporate media lobbyists shaking hands and sharing meals with our elected representatives, we found that stories about local issues spoke louder than the richest broadcasters in the world.
3.	Change takes time. It took our grassroots eﬀorts ten years to get a pro- public interest correction through. Ten years is like forever in the cur- rent environment of technological change, so choose your issues wisely.
4.	If you ﬂit from hot topic to hot topic, you will never win. Industry always has its insider advantages in the short term. Choose campaigns well, campaigns that will keep on making a diﬀerence in long term, and stick with them long enough to win them.
5.	Community-building events strengthen movements for the long haul. If we can come together outside of campaign work—outside of calling Congress, signing petitions, taking action—we will build a more per- manent understanding of each other across communities, race, and class, that is, the lines that divide us and keep big media strong.

Prometheus kept the LPFM radio movement vibrant by bringing together practitioners, hopefuls, and friends for “radio barnraisings”—events that brought together communities to build a radio station over the course of a weekend—hand pulling a donated radio tower up to its full height in rural Tennessee; at the top of water towers in Woodburn, Oregon, and in the ﬁelds with strawberry pickers. Radio barnraisings included the construction of a studio, over forty workshops on radio technology, politics, content and opera- tions, and erecting the antenna. In addition to the physical construction of the station, radio news stories and announcements were edited, organizing meet- ings were held, and live radio dramas were performed during the ﬁrst broadcast of the new station on Sunday night before everyone went home. We built LPFM radio stations, and a movement that fought and won media reform.