All Things Considered
October 5, 1998

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: This is NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert
Siegel.

NOAH ADAMS, HOST: And I'm Noah Adams.

If you were in Washington, D.C. last night, tuning around on the radio,
and you happened to stop at 97.5 FM, you would have heard only this.

SOUNDBITE OF RADIO STATIC

ADAMS: Inside a local Hispanic community center, though, a handful of
people were trying to change that. They were setting up a pirate radio
station.

In the 1990s, something of a movement has developed around low-watt
transmitters that cover tiny areas, often just the communities in which
they're based.

They are illegal in this country. The Federal Communications Commission
has shut down more and more of them, and that's what's brought dozens of
their advocates to Washington, D.C.

NPR's Dean Olsher has a report.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 97.5, right?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 97.5.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, there's power, you know.

DEAN OLSHER, NPR REPORTER: The man struggling with the equipment calls
himself Pete Treatish [sic]. He doesn't want to say his real name, and not
because the FCC doesn't know it already. But people keep forgetting not to
call him Dylan around me.

Each time they catch themselves, with a wide-eyed guilty look. Dylan, AKA
Pete, has a black beard worthy of a pirate, but also a frontiersman. In a
way, that's what he is.

SOUNDBITE OF RADIO BUZZ

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, good, at least we got something. Oops.

SOUNDBITE OF RADIO STATIC

OLSHER: Operators of low-power FM stations, called micro-radio stations,
credit an anarchist in Berkeley with starting this movement. That station
began over dissatisfaction with mainstream media's lack of coverage of
protests against the Gulf War.

Some want to come back to widespread consolidation of ownership. Some are
just plain bored with how market-tested and sanitized radio is these days.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE [Sara Zia-Ebrahimi]: Are we getting close to
(unintelligible)? Natalie was wondering (unintelligible). We're, like, are
you ready?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm doing what I can do.

FEMALE: I told them.

OLSHER: As hundreds of these pirate radio stations are being shut down,
many are fighting back. When Pete's station was issued a warning by the
FCC last Fall, he and his co-revolutionaries broadcast in front of Ben
Franklin's printing press in downtown Philadelphia. Their slogan, borrowed
from Franklin, was: "Necessity Knows No Law."

PETE, PIRATE RADIO STATIONER: In our demonstration, we announced a
seven-point platform of how we were going to make the FCC's life really
suck if they didn't, you know, do something about legalizing micro-radio.

In general, I mean, the main thing that we said was: for every station
that you shut down, we're going to open up 10 more around the country. And
you're never going to be able to stop us.

OLSHER: While it's true that much of the imagery surrounding this effort
has to do with pirates -- the station in Philadelphia, for example, was
called Radio Mutiny until federal marshals seized its equipment. A
competing set of images is borrowed from the Founding Fathers, whose core
concept was not stealing, but taking back what they believed to be
rightfully theirs.

BEN COBB, INDEPENDENT TRADE JOURNALIST: This is a big conundrum for the
FCC.

OLSHER: Ben Cobb is an independent trade journalist who covers the Federal
Communications Commission.

COBB: Because the Commission has always promoted localism, local
ownership, relevance to local community affairs, spectrum efficiency; all
of these things the micro-radio movement endorses and puts into practice.
But until the FCC, and I believe the Congress, recognize that there's
something going on here, and perhaps we need to look anew at the structure
of broadcasting, which was really set into stone 70 years ago.

OLSHER: Micro-radio broadcasters came to Washington this weekend to spread
that message.  They came to march to the FCC and the National Association
of Broadcasters, transmitting pirate signals into those offices from a
backpack.

About 85 of the radio pirates registered for a conference in a
neighborhood Latin American youth center, with workshops on technical and
legal matters. In one room, a quick scan of the T-shirts gave an idea of
the different place they're coming from.

One, worn by an African-American man, reads: "Fred Hampton: You Can Kill
The Revolutionary, But You Can't Kill The Revolution."

Another: "Congress Shall Make No Law Abridging the Freedom Of Speech Or
The Right Of The People Peaceably To Assemble."

Next to him: "Big Burrito, Austin [sic], Massachusetts."

A few of the people here are tattooed and pierced. A few are not white and
male. [JW comments: The conference seemed pretty evenly split,
gender-wise, to me.] The conference included folks from each end of the
political spectrum: Libertarians to anarchists like Pete Treatish [sic].

PETE: There are people in churches that do micro-radio.There are
grandmothers that do  micro-radio.  There's Black Panthers. You know,
militia members.

OLSHER: And there are people like Diane Fleming, "the condom lady of West
Philadelphia," who used to broadcast a safe sex show on Radio Mutiny. Now
that that station is gone, she tapes her program and sends it to
micro-stations in Gainesville, Memphis and Santa Cruz. So much for
ultra-local community radio.

But the condom lady does what she does not out of any particular love for
the medium, but because this is the best way she knows how to make a
difference in society.

DIANE FLEMING, "THE CONDOM LADY"; PIRATE RADIO STATIONER: You know, I'm
here to let the FCC know this weekend that, you know, I'll be a thorn in
their side until they let me stop the flow of epidemics. Because I have a
-- I feel that we have our fingers on the pulse of a medium that can help
us change history in a positive way, instead of in a negative way.

OLSHER: Micro-radio is a movement of people with vastly different agendas,
which is something else it shares in common with the Founding Fathers of
the United States.

SOUNDBITE OF RADIO STATIC

OLSHER: Last night's inaugural broadcast of Washington, D.C.'s newest
radio station was, in the spirit of the micro-radio movement, rugged.
There was a constant hum [JW comments: Double O Jones eventually fixed
that problem], and there was none of the rehearsed spectacle of, say, the
lighting of the National Christmas Tree.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE PIRATE RADIO STATIONER [Double O Jones of Free Radio
Montrose]: Check. One, two. OK. Well, I'm -- actually, I'm just checking
the microphone.

OLSHER: In fact, it wasn't clear to the people ready on the stage for the
live broadcast that they were on the air.

PIRATE RADIO STATIONER [Double O Jones]: Hey, how you doing up there on
the transmitter? Is this a good enough test for these microphones? This is
what you're going to be hearing out over the air.  We're tuning things up
right now. So if all of you want to go out there and turn on your radios,
97.5 FM.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE [Jesse Walker]: I'd just like to say we're on the air
right now.

SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

MALE: (unintelligible). Is everything all tuned up up there?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Absolutely.

MALE: Welcome. Welcome to D.C., to your own backyard, 97.5, Radio Free Mt.
Pleasant.

SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

SOUNDBITE OF WOMAN SPEAKING IN SPANISH

OLSHER: There were other less than smooth moments. Organizers of the
weekend had hoped to drive around with their transmitter in the car and
broadcast to neighborhoods in D.C. That didn't happen, because they
couldn't be sure their mobile stations would not interfere with licensed
signals. That's something they absolutely do not want to do.

It's fine to break the law to make a point, they say. But they're not
interested in stepping on other people's rights to the airwaves.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They want to sell you the airwaves. They want to sell
you the very air you breath, but tonight we know it's ours. And we can
take it whenever we want it. Power to the people.

SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

OLSHER: Dean Olsher, NPR News, Washington.

[JW comments: They didn't identify it as such, but the music they then
played between this report and the next one was culled from our Sunday
night broadcast.]