Prometheus Unbound

Transcript from On The Media (onthemedia.org) - April 22, 2005
(you can also listen to the broadcast from WNYC)

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. During the '90s, scores of pirate radio broadcasters took to the air across the country. Many of them said they were engaged in civil disobedience against commercial stations that had abandoned community service and federal regulators who let it happen. When the FCC cracked down on the Philadelphia station Radio Mutiny, the pirates decided to become players. They re-invented themselves as the Prometheus Radio Project and helped lobby for new community radio licenses. Now, hundreds of those stations are on the air, and Prometheus is at work in Washington to create even more. Rick Karr has a profile of the group.

RICK KARR: On a November night in 1996, anyone who happened to be surfing around the left hand side of the FM dial in Philadelphia might have stumbled across a new station. It started by playing The Clash, declaring that they were so bored with the USA; then a kind of manifesto - Elvis Costello - blasting the state of American radio. [MUSIC]

ELVIS COSTELLO: [SINGING] THEY SAY YOU BETTER LISTEN TO THE RIGHT SIDE REASONS, BUT THAT'LL GIVE YOU ENERGIZE CAUSE THEY THINK THAT IT'S TREASON. SO YOU HAD BETTER DO AS YOU ARE TOLD. YOU BETTER LISTEN TO THE RADIO.

RICK KARR: The man who flipped the switch that started the pirate broadcasts from his own home was named Dylan Wrynn, though that was about to change. He and a few other progressive activists in West Philadelphia had been struggling for months to get the transmitter to work. He says their activist friends thought it was a waste of time, until that Clash song hit the air.

PETE TRIDISH: When we actually turned it on, and it actually worked, everyone was like - Wow! That's cool. And, you know, I haven't heard the Clash on the radio in ten years, you know.

RICK KARR: After the Costello song ended, Dylan Wrynn opened his microphone and re-christened himself.

DYLAN WRYNN: Hello Philadelphia. This is Pete TriDish, and I'm here with Bertha Venus, Noah Vale and Madame X.

MILLIE WATTS: And I'm Millie Watts, and you're listening to 89.1 - WPPR - Radio Mutiny - Citizens Band.

RICK KARR: TriDish still goes by that nom d'air. He says Radio Mutiny was born out of frustration. For years, he'd been protesting against war and corporate power for housing, labor and green causes.

PETE TRIDISH: We might have learned how to, like, hold up a sign or something like that, and, like, get five seconds on the news by shouting something that rhymed or something.

RICK KARR: But they couldn't get any traction. TriDish says he realized that the people they protested against got all kinds of media attention.

PETE TRIDISH: And that a lot of the corporations that I ended up fighting in one way or another were actually owners of media, so I essentially came to the conclusion that working against, you know, the domination of the media by a handful of corporations was the key to supporting all of the issues that I'd worked on before.

RICK KARR: A lot of those issues showed up on Radio Mutiny's schedule. There were gay and lesbian themed shows-

WO

BREWSTER KAHLE: Hello! You are listening to the Queer Girl Music Hour on WPPR, the awesome West Philly Pirate Radio.

RICK KARR: Programs on unions and labor rights…

WOMAN: This kind of bogus evidence that they brought to get rid of Matt and try to stifle the union drive is something that we, in our appeal, called the "freakish pursuit of disciplinary discharge of a Job Corps enrollee."

RICK KARR: As well as shows on prisons and current affairs in Africa. TriDish says less than a year after Radio Mutiny went on the air, the FCC started cracking down on pirates. One night, while the collective that ran the station met to discuss the string of busts, one of his housemates went to answer a knock on the front door.

PETE TRIDISH: [QUOTING] FCC! Let us in! We're going to break the door down, if you don't let us in. And she was like-Ah, ha, ha - everyone's always saying that. You know? It's like, kind of like the big joke at the pirate radio house; it's like people are always pretending they're the FCC.

RICK KARR:But this was no joke. It was the first of six visits from the FCC. After the Feds finally confiscated the station's equipment, the pirates turned to protest. They headed to Washington, armed with a portable transmitter, and beamed a broadcast at the FCC building. Then, they marched to the headquarters of the National Association of Broadcasters and took over the plaza where the lobbying group's flag was flapping in the breeze.

PETE TRIDISH: We surrounded the flagpole. We pulled down the flag really fast. We had someone from Earth First that was, like, good at this stuff. And we ran up a Jolly Roger, you know, a pirate radio flag, and we were like - Yes! You know, [LAUGHS] we-we win.

RICK KARR: In hindsight, TriDish says, it wasn't the best way to effect change in Washington. His "Ah-ha" moment came when he was invited to speak at the Libertarian Cato Institute. After the talk, an FCC bureaucrat approached TriDish and asked him if he and his fellow pirates might be interested in helping the agency establish a new legal community radio service.

PETE TRIDISH: It became kind of apparent to me that the FCC, one way or the other, was going to create a low power radio service, and it was really only a question of whether we planned to participate in it or not.

RICK KARR: TriDish started boning up on arcane technical regulations and submitting briefs to the FCC. In 1999, the commission voted to make hundreds of LPFM licenses available. The first order of business for Prometheus, which has only three full time staffers, became helping those stations get on the air. The group holds LPFM barn raisings. Dozens of volunteers descend on a community that's been granted a license, and over the course of a weekend, build the station and train its volunteer staff. TriDish says he tries to drive home a lesson that he learned during his pirate days at Radio Mutiny that the most important thing about community radio stations is community - not radio.

PETE TRIDISH: What's important about them is not the box that broadcasts the radio; what matters is the social structures that evolve around them - that people learn how to cooperate, that they learn how to take time away from their job or whatever it is to, like, put back into their community. That's the real value that comes out of it, and those are the sorts of community institutions that I think need to exist in order to counter the kind of monopolistic, hegemonic power that the corporations have.

RICK KARR: Those media corporations have resisted LPFM. The NAB and National Public Radio objected to the new stations on the grounds that they'd interfere with existing signals. The big broadcasters convinced Congress to scale back the FCC proposal dramatically. Prometheus started working to convince Congress to restore the original FCC plan, and that's made for some unusual political alliances. Scores of the new stations are licensed to religious groups. Hannah Sassaman, who coordinates outreach for Prometheus, says the religious right shares the goal of expanding community broadcasting, and Prometheus needs Christian broadcasters as allies.

HANNAH SASSAMAN: They all have very well organized and funded low power FMs. They all have really strong connections with their senators.

RICK KARR: The fight in Washington prompts some media reform advocates to question Prometheus's obsession with radio. They suggest that it'd make more sense for the group to concentrate on rolling out high-speed wireless internet access, so that anyone with access to a computer could become a broadcaster. But Hannah Sassaman says Prometheus won't abandon radio just because there's a flashy new technology out there.

HANNAH SASSAMAN: A radio is something which you can construct one that doesn't require any external power. You can crank it up. It can be powered by the sun. You can take one apart and kind of figure out how it works. You can put together a radio station that's very, very inexpensive. Everyone has a radio in their home, and they're going to continue to for the next 50 years.

RICK KARR: Pete TriDish says Radio is still kind of magical - that it appeals to the geek in him. On Tuesdays, a group gathers at his house for Geek Night.

PETE TRIDISH: So what'd you bring for us?

RICK KARR: They chat about technology and poke around inside transmitters and receivers. On this particular Geek Night, TriDish and some friends wrestled with a hundred pound part from an FM transmitter they'd picked up from a failed station.

BREWSTER KAHLE: Okay. So, I think what we want to do is open this up without taking it apart too far - like, like get - so we can get at the board and stuff.

WOMAN: Mm-hm.

RICK KARR: TriDish flipped the power switch, and the geek in him lit up.

PETE TRIDISH: What a beast. It's got its own fan in it.

RICK KARR: He spun the dial of a transistor radio, to search for the signal. [RADIO DIAL COVERING SEVERAL STATIONS] But the transmitter was a disappointment. It was broadcasting at a frequency well below the FM band. It stayed on his workbench. He hoped to figure out how to make it useful. TriDish's room looks like an updated version of Grandpa Munster's laboratory in the old TV show. Spare parts spill out of bins, and disemboweled computers lie on tables. There are also a lot of pirate-themed toys. TriDish says that while he hasn't made an illegal broadcast in years, he's still fascinated by buccaneers.

PETE TRIDISH: Pirates actually created some of the first constitutional democracies - others - you know, they freed all the slaves that they encountered. They, like, had these, like, really interesting like multi-lingual communities. You know, they were people that, you know, fought governments and, like, lived outside of the system.

RICK KARR: For now, Pete TriDish is working inside the system in Washington. Earlier this year, Arizona Republican Senator John McCain re-introduced a bill that would open up more LPFM licenses. And, while advocates failed to get any other members of the GOP to sign on as couple of-sponsors, they're working to get the bill moved out of committee. For On the Media, I'm Rick Karr.

copyright 2005 WNYC Radio

(you can also listen to the broadcast from WNYC)