Five Years of LPFM

One day in 1998, I found myself sitting in a West Philadelphia church with a bunch of pirate radio broadcasters. They were listening to the head of the Federal Communications Commission's enforcement bureau advise them to go off the air; and then, when it came time for questions and answers, they were telling the enforcer to stuff it.

Two years later, the FCC started issuing licenses to low-power radio stations; and yesterday, it marked the fifth anniversary of the program with a forum in Washington. I saw some of the same faces there that I'd seen in Philly in 1998. But this time, the stations they were defending were legal, and this time, the agency was much less hostile. Chairman Michael Powell, not historically a friend of low-power radio, declared that it "holds a special place in our heart." Across town, Sens. McCain, Cantwell, and Leahy were introducing the Local Community Radio Act of 2005, which would repeal the most restrictive restraint Congress put on low-power stations after the FCC decided to permit them. Powell endorsed their bill in his remarks, describing it as "exciting"; three of the other four commissioners came out for the legislation as well. (The odd man out was Kevin Martin, Powell's likely successor as FCC chairman, who deftly avoided the subject.)

The forum's featured attraction was a collection of low-power broadcasters from around the country. They also seemed enthusiastic about the bill, though some suggested that it was too little, too late. Though legal, their stations have "secondary" status, which essentially means they aren't protected against interference. Thanks to a recent boom in translators—that is, stations that simply retransmit other stations' signals—several low-power outfits are now losing substantial slices of their coverage areas; what's more, many of those translators are taking up the very frequencies that have been off-limits to low-power stations since Congress' restrictions went into effect. In effect, the government has said you can't build a new station in those pockets of the FM band, but if you want to set up a repeater signal for a station that already exists, that's OK. And if it cuts into a low-power signal, that's OK too.

The stations in attendence were a diverse bunch: from WCIW, an outlet for migrant workers in Immokalee, Florida, to WUVS, a black-oriented Michigan station that, according to general manager Paul Billings, is currently number one in the local ratings. Two stations came from the public sector: WMLZ in Temperance, Michigan, run by and for high school students, and WMVK in Perryville, Maryland, which is owned by the state transit administration and offers a "transportation talk" format. The latter stands out for two reasons: It was the only station there that I had virtually no interest in hearing, and its representative was the only person on his panel with the stereotypical Radio Voice.