Moore interviewed Berg for "Fahrenheit" [index to thread at reply #1859]

I think this is the December Conference (the 2nd Rebuilding Iraq Conference, the first was August 28 - 29, 2003 in Arlington). Livius: I am wondering if Ahmad Kuba might also be the Sam Kubba mentioned in this article (executive of the American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce).

At U.S. Meeting, Iraq Appears Open for Business
Michael Janofsky
New York Times
Dec 5, 2003. pg. A.1
Dateline: ARLINGTON, Va., Dec. 4
Column Name: A Region Inflamed: The Reconstruction
Section: A
ISSN/ISBN: 03624331
The room had the feel of a souk, a constant buzz, chatter in lots of languages, display tables showing off wares.
In fact, it was a marketplace of sorts, just off the lobby of a Sheraton hotel here, but one with a specific purpose: more than 400 people from 30 countries had gathered Wednesday and Thursday for a conference focusing on how to rebuild Iraq and get a piece of the $18.3 billion Congress has authorized for the effort.
There were bankers, architects, lawyers, engineers, real estate developers, insurance agents, construction specialists, transportation experts, communication company owners, investment counselors and more than 40 Iraqi officials working with the Coalition Provisional Authority, who were eager to meet as many suitors as possible.
If the participants conveyed a common message it was this: despite suicide bombers, snipers and attacks from Saddam Hussein loyalists, Iraq is open for business.
There were sobering reminders of the daily dangers that confront both military personnel and civilians, including one company selling vehicle armor protection and another selling walls so strong that they could withstand .50-caliber bullets. ''We're working on one now that will be able to sustain a shoulder-fired rocket attack,'' said Prentice Perry, vice president of the wall company, Therma Steel. The company motto, he said, is, ''We stand behind our walls.''
But for the most part, the networking was upbeat, as business and government leaders sought each other out as potential partners in the enormous task of reconstructing the country.
''Our purpose is to help United States companies connect with Middle Eastern countries and with individual Iraqis with lots of emphasis on the alliances already on the ground,'' said Samir Farajallah, president of New Fields, the United Arab Emirates company that organized this meeting and another one last month. ''You hear a lot of negative stories out of Iraq, but the truth of the matter is, there are a lot of very successful stories.''
As the ranking Iraqi participating in the conference, Sami al-Maajoun, the minister of labor and social affairs, said he was ''very encouraged'' by American and British efforts to engage in rebuilding.
So far, the efforts have grown out of an initial round of contracts between the United States and large multinational corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, to take on big-ticket items like safeguarding oil fields, paving roads and rebuilding schools.
In marked contrast to the openness of the meeting this week, those contracts were often awarded without competitive bidding in a process that has been criticized as being inscrutable to outsiders.
Now, Mr. Maajoun said, Iraq is ready for many more partners.
''Iraqis are crying out for employment,'' he said. ''We want to rebuild. Construction means jobs that will bring Iraq back to the situation it should have been in as far as its own wealth is concerned.''
The efforts promise to be anything but easy, complicated by developments on the ground and evolving laws arising from an evolving government. While large projects require direct participation and approval by the United States government, smaller ones may not, and the distinctions are not always clear.
''We explain how the processes work -- or not work -- and give some idea of how they may work in the future,'' said Bill Espinosa of Pillsbury Winthrop, a law firm represented at the conference that does extensive work in international development. ''We've seen a lot of interest in Iraq, but there is also a lot of frustration involved in a significant way.''
One source of that frustration, said Sam Kubba, chief executive of the American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce, are the competing views of how Iraq should achieve self-rule. The Iraqi Governing Council, appointed by the provisional authority, agreed in a vote Sunday that full national elections sought by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's senior Shiite cleric, would be the best way to choose an interim government. The council established a committee to examine whether it was feasible to organize full elections for June.
Mr. Kubba, whose organization of American Iraqi businessmen was set up this year in Washington, called their differences a potential disincentive to future investment, making them ''a very serious conflict that holds serious consequences if not resolved.''
Still, the uncertain electoral, financial and military landscape did not seem to discourage dozens of those attending the conference from pursuing their goals.
Nick Katsiotis, vice president of a construction company based in Washington, is bidding on two housing projects of 504 units each, one in Mosul and the other in Kirkuk.
Gordon Bobbitt, marketing manager for Kalmar, a Swedish company, was trying to sell huge all-terrain vehicles that can transport shipping crates anywhere.
Igor Salaru, owner of the Brazilian company Icatel, the world's largest manufacturer of pay phones, was seeking Iraqi connections to develop a new system of public phones.
Then there was Hisham Ashkouri, an Iraqi-born architect now living in Boston, who wore a bright red bow tie and carried a case filled with brochures and CD's that show off his latest design -- a soaring 31-story hotel and theater complex called Cinema Sinbad that he wants to build in downtown Baghdad.
He said he was ''80 to 90 percent there'' with financial backing, government support and a commercial sponsor, the Starwood Hotel and Resorts Company.
''There's always room for problems,'' he said. ''But with my emotional side speaking, if something like this can become a big part of reconstructing Baghdad that can show the local population alternatives to violence and disruption, to me, that's why we're going ahead. That's why I'm working on it.''
[Photograph] John Simmons, center, attended a two-day conference in Arlington, Va., with others interested in pursuing business projects in Iraq. (Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times)

I haven't had time to catch up on this thread since yesterday, so you guys may have all this figured out by now. Please add this to the growing list of "coinky-dinks" that seems to be piling up with all matters related to Nicholas Berg.

I'm including 3 articles. This first article is good background information about the radio movement and Pete Tridish. Other names of people and organizations are bolded so they're easier to spot (in case we recognize them later.)

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy
April 18, 2002

Taking to the Airwaves
By Nicole Wallace

Churchton, Md.

The signs on the studio's wall offer the first clue that the radio station here, which serves small towns on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, is unusual. One admonishes on-air personnel to speak directly into the microphone. Another reminds them to read the station identification -- WRYR 97.5 -- every hour on the hour.

The advice may seem basic, but it has to be. The station, which has been broadcasting since February, is run entirely by volunteers, few of whom have experience in radio. South Arundel Citizens for Responsible Development, the grass-roots environmental organization that operates WRYR, is one of the first local nonprofit groups in the country to take to the airwaves with its own radio station as part of the low-power radio service established by the Federal Communications Commission in January 2000. The low-power stations, which have a 100-watt signal, can reach a radius of three or four miles, compared with commercial stations that broadcast at 100,000 watts.

WRYR features local storytellers, musicians, and ministers, and the group plans to develop shows that discuss local history, give the watermen who work on the bay a chance to share their way of life and perspectives, and allow listeners to call in and discuss their feelings about local environmental issues. "By promoting and sharing the uniqueness of the community, it makes it a little bit easier to protect it," says Mike Shay, the group's vice president.

More than 3,400 organizations have applied for low-power radio licenses so far as a way to advance a wide range of missions. Among the proposed offerings: regional music, talk shows produced by and for young people, language instruction, religious programming, and local news for immigrants in their native tongues.

About 250 charities, churches, advocacy groups, schools, government agencies, and other noncommercial organizations have received permission from the FCC to start broadcasting. Despite their diverse causes, they share a commitment to creating a local voice and a sense of place on the airwaves at a time when much of broadcasting is becoming more and more centralized. As they take their first tentative steps into the world of radio, these organizations find themselves facing old challenges, such as how to raise money to pay for the radio programming, and new issues, such as deciding what broadcasting equipment to use.

To help answer the technical questions, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, in San Francisco, is developing a manual to guide organizations through the process of starting up a small radio station. Information will include advice on such issues as determining the best location for positioning the radio towers. The Ford Foundation, in New York, has given the federation a one-year, $125,000 grant to assist start-up stations.

Carol Pierson, chief executive officer of the federation, says her group also plans to organize a group purchasing program to help charities save money on their equipment. "They're not radio broadcasters, so they're starting from scratch," she says.

Controversial Idea

When the FCC first proposed the idea of low-power FM stations, the plan touched off fierce opposition from the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents commercial broadcasters, and National Public Radio, which feared that the stations would interfere with their frequencies (The Chronicle, June 1, 2000). Congress weighed in on the matter in December 2000 with a law that increased the amount of space on the dial necessary between a low-power station and neighboring stations. Even under the FCC's original requirements, few frequencies were available in congested urban markets like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The requirements also knock out smaller cities, such as Portland, Ore, and Minneapolis, meaning that most of the available frequencies are in rural and suburban areas.

Despite the setback, advocates of low-power radio believe that the new service has the potential to significantly increase the number of so-called community radio stations in the country.

The FCC is first considering licenses for 100-watt stations; it has yet to announce when it will accept applications for the even smaller 10-watt stations that would allow organizations to broadcast to an area with a radius of one or two miles.

Ms. Pierson of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters expects that more than 1,000 licenses will be issued by the time the FCC works its way through the applications for 100-watt stations. Of those, she estimates that about half will go to churches that plan to use the stations to spread their religious message and half to community-oriented stations.

After organizations get the green light from the FCC to start a station, many face the challenge of figuring out how to turn their ideas into programming that will further their missions, says Cheryl A. Leanza, deputy director of the Media Access Project, a nonprofit law group, in Washington, that focuses on telecommunications policy and that helped spearhead the fight for low-power radio.

"Once the dog catches the car, what does the dog do with it? It's that sort of problem," says Ms. Leanza. "Wow, you have a radio station. Now what are you going to do?"

(snip -- long paragraphs about a Fresno, CA station that gives news in the Hmong language and an Opelousas, LA station that plays Zydeco and Cajun music.)

That kind of commitment to local information will make the new stations a boon to other nonprofit organizations, predict low-power radio advocates. Pete Tridish -- the name that Prometheus Radio Project co-founder Dylan Wrynn has used since his days as a radio pirate running an unlicensed station called Radio Mutiny -- believes that charities will find low-power stations more receptive than other media outlets to discussing their issues at length.

"When you're talking to the corporate media, you have to talk in sound bites. You have to train everybody to stay on message. Otherwise you're going to get distorted," he says. "When you're talking to a community radio station, you don't have to be a talking head. You can just be yourself."

Mr. Tridish's Philadelphia group is organizing a series of what it calls "radio barn raisings," where low-power advocates and radio enthusiasts gather to help an organization put its radio station together, get to know one another, and learn more about radio. In addition to drawing representatives from groups that are building stations, the gatherings have attracted participants from organizations that are still waiting to receive an answer from the FCC about their applications.

Andrea Cano, director of the Microradio Implementation Project, in Portland, Ore., says that proponents of low-power radio had hoped that the FCC approval process would move more swiftly than it has. She says groups that have not heard from the FCC feel as if they are in limbo, which makes it difficult for them to maintain the enthusiasm of their volunteers and to raise the money they'll need to start broadcasting.

Ms. Cano recommends that they look at the time as an opportunity to hold town meetings to find out what topics most interest residents of their area, decide who will be in charge of various tasks if the license comes through, and maybe even test the waters as radio broadcasters on the Internet.

(snip -- detailed info about museums)

Money Problems

Despite their relative lack of technical savvy, many of the organizations that are starting stations say that fund raising has been a bigger challenge than learning the ins and outs of radio. (In the case of Prometheus Radio, this is where George Soros enters the picture...)

Bird Street Media, an organization that was founded to apply for the license, plans to broadcast an eclectic mix of programming -- including radio dramas written by a member of the community theater, a resource show that explains how residents can seek help for problems they face, and local news. It took $10,000 for the Oroville, Calif., charity to get the station on the air this month. So far, Bird Street Media has brought in $3,000 with its Hundred Dollar Hundred Founders club, and took out a loan to cover the additional $7,000 to purchase its equipment.

With all the work involved in starting the station and developing programs, the organization hasn't had a chance to submit any proposals to foundations or corporations that might support their work. "Everybody's been so busy. We've got such a small base, probably five or six people who are doing the majority of the work here," says Marianne Knorzer, the station's manager.

The Newport Musical Arts Association, in Rhode Island, also a new group, has applied for grants with no success. "It was always the same story," says the group's co-founder, Steve Cerilli. "The grant makers wanted to see a track record of at least three years. They wanted to see, Have you received any other grants from other grant makers?"

Mr. Cerilli estimates that it cost $10,000 to $11,000 to get the station going. The group held a fund-raising event in December which brought in $2,400. Mr. Cerilli and co-founder Frank Tassitano charged the rest to their personal credit cards. The organization hopes to raise money from listeners and by presenting jazz concerts in Newport.

Alternative Broadcasting

Mr. Tridish, of the Prometheus Radio Project, believes that the benefits of low-power radio as an alternative to mainstream radio are worth the hard work charities are putting into developing quality programs and the struggle to find funds. The goal of commercial radio, he says, is to deliver as many listeners as possible to advertisers at the lowest cost, but community radio is a very different experience.

"It's more like you meet a stranger in a park, and you talk for a couple hours, and then they invite you over to their house and they start pulling all their records off the shelf and start playing them all for you," he says. "It's more like making a friend."

In the next article, please note the reference to "prisons" and "Incarceration Nation," a radio program on Pete Tridish's now-defunct Radio Mutiny station. (Remember Berg's reference to "a prison" in his email to "stockholders?")

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
March 13, 2002, Wednesday

Activists' mission: Bringing radio power to the people
By Eils Lotozo

PHILADELPHIA _ When radio station WRYR-FM went on the air last month with its inaugural broadcast of a bluegrass concert and the meeting of a local preservation group, it was a historic moment.

Launched by an anti-sprawl organization in tiny Churchton, Md., the station is one of the first of a new breed of community broadcasters to hit the airwaves.

And Pete Tridish and his Prometheus Radio Project cohorts played a vital role. The West Philadelphia-based Prometheus helped figure out how to get the station's signal to bounce across Chesapeake Bay -- and drew more than 100 people for a weekend-long conference called a "radio barn-raising."

Next month Tridish will travel to Northern California to help citizens in Oroville get on the air. After that, it will be Opelousas, La., where a community group that helps farmers and stages a huge zydeco festival hopes to begin broadcasting.

Offering advice on everything from FCC regulations to fund-raising, Prometheus Radio Project (motto: "Freeing the airwaves from corporate control") has become a national force in the low-power FM movement.

"In an age of media consolidation, when fewer and fewer voices have access to the airwaves, Prometheus is really important," said Michael Bracy of the Low Power Radio Coalition, a Washington lobbying group. "They work with people who see a need and give them the tools to make a radio station a reality."

Compared with conventional stations, whose 50,000-watt signals can reach hundreds of miles, low-power stations cannot exceed 100 watts, which gives them a 10-mile range.

"It's all about bringing democracy to the airwaves," said Tridish, 30.

His real name is Dylan Wrynn, though he prefers the moniker Pete Tridish (pronounced petri dish), which he adopted as a radio pirate, part of the Radio Mutiny collective that broadcast illegally from West Philly on 91.3 FM.

"I live in a house full of activists and we were just really tired," said the Brooklyn native, recalling Radio Mutiny's 1996 founding. "In order to get our messages across we had to dress up in bunny suits and stage demonstrations. The media would have five seconds of us shouting something that rhymes, and our opponents got 15 minutes on MacNeil-Lehrer."

Tridish and friends found their answer in pirate radio. Pioneered by a tenant's-rights activist named DeWayne Readus, who started broadcasting from a Springfield, Ill., public-housing project in 1987, pirate stations were popping up across the country by the mid-'90s as part of what Tridish called an "electronic civil disobedience movement."

With the help of a $150 transmitter kit purchased from a Berkeley, Calif., radio pirate, Radio Mutiny went on the air with an eclectic mix of programming -- reggae and house music, poetry and dramas, the "Condom Lady" dispensing safe-sex tips, and the "Incarceration Nation" reporting on prisons.

But after a long cat-and-mouse game with the FCC, which forced them to move their equipment from place to place, they were shut down in 1998.

Then a funny thing happened. Tridish got wind that a change was in the air: Then-FCC chairman William Kennard was considering creating a new kind of FM license to provide just the kind of radio access the pirates had been promoting.

So Tridish went legit _ and with four others started Prometheus, which set to work helping the FCC make a case for low-power stations. These types of licenses had been relatively easy to get until 1978, Tridish pointed out, when the FCC banned them at the urging of National Public Radio, which saw them as an obstacle to a national network.

When the FCC finally voted in January 2000 to grant a new class of radio licenses to nonprofit groups, churches and schools, more than 3,000 applications flooded in.

But the euphoria was short-lived. The measure had been fiercely opposed by the National Association of Broadcasters, which insisted that the new stations would create unwanted interference. The organization got Congress to pass a bill that overrode the FCC.

"That was very unusual," said Tridish. "We were kind of blindsided. Congress doesn't know a watt from a volt, and it has never overruled the FCC on a technical issue."

The result was that community stations were banned in all urban areas. Nearly 80 percent of the original applications were disqualified.

"Sometimes I don't know whether we won or we lost," Tridish said.

The law does allow community broadcasters in rural areas and in small towns, where the radio dial is less crowded. So far, 232 stations have been granted construction permits; at least six are already on the air.

Congress "created a challenge for us," Tridish said. "We had been focusing on big cities. Under the FCC's plan, Minneapolis was going to get five stations. And then that was taken away. But it's been exciting to reach beyond the familiar networks and find civic groups in rural places [How "rural" would he consider Iraq to be?] and support them."

Michael Shay, whose organization runs the Maryland station, said the radio barn-raising drew people from as far away as Alaska, Guatemala and Japan. "For that weekend," Shay said, "we were the center of the Earth for community radio."

Tridish, who works out of a church basement office with his colleagues Jon Strange, Marissa Johnson and Caroline Leopold, still seems stunned to find himself ensconced at an organization supported by grants from the Ford and MacArthur Foundations. "If you'd told me three years ago I'd be running a small nonprofit, I wouldn't have believed it," said the former carpenter.

Not that he's really running the place. "We all make the same hourly wage and we all decide things collectively," said Tridish, who spends most Saturdays in the office and drives an old Ford christened "Hedy Lamar" after the movie star who also invented a radio device. "I've just been doing it the longest."

In his spare time, Tridish helps out with Radio Volta, a Web radio station that's a joint effort of some former Radio Mutiny folks and the like-minded Independent Media Center. The all-volunteer effort broadcasts out of the old Radio Mutiny studio in Tridish's house. It also can be heard on the regular airwaves, thanks to a special arrangement with a West Philadelphia station (WPEB-FM, 88.1).

Tridish is hopeful that someday the obstacles to urban community radio will be lifted. For now, Congress has ordered the FCC to study whether the low-power stations really interfere with the radio giants.

"They'll probably spend millions on it, and it will tell us what we already know about radio," Tridish said. "Then it's up to Congress.

"We're going to be campaigning. It's far from over."

Three things about this next one:

I think I figured out why Nick Berg made a strange mention of passing "a prison" in Israel (or Jordan or wherever it was.) It seems that one of the "issues" for these left-wing radio political activists is prison reform -- a reformation of inhumane prison systems and institutional justice.
Also, in the article you will see Pete Tridish (aka Dylan Wrynn) refer to Michael Moore in a direct quote, holding him up as a role model for the leftist radio movement.
Oh, and I saved the best for last. Like Nick Berg, Mr. PeteTridish also "helped set up the radio center for anti-globalism protesters at the Republican National Convention in his hometown of Philadelphia."

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

American Journalism Review
October 2000

Low-power to the People

By Marc Fisher; Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher has written for AJR about public radio's "This American Life," radio legend Paul Harvey, and the decline of news on commercial radio.
Political activists, music buffs and church groups are eagerly pursuing low-power radio licenses that will allow them to reach neighborhoods rather than regions. But commercial stations and NPR want Congress to slow down this bandwagon.

Christopher Maxwell was working as a drywall finisher when he approached the bosses of his local public radio station in Richmond, Virginia, WCVE, and asked why they couldn't air his favorite programs: National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," the intelligent interviews of "Fresh Air" or perhaps play some local bands, or at least some music more adventuresome than the station's middle-of-the-road classical fare.

Maxwell's request was politely rebuffed. When he pressed the issue, asking the station to open up a second frequency for local news and other alternative programming, he says he was told to go start his own station. Which is precisely what Maxwell, like 13,000 other Americans who have requested applications from the FCC to launch low-power FM stations, is trying to do.

"Radio has become a wasteland," says Maxwell, 34, a self-described computer geek and former cab driver who runs Radio Free Richmond out of his overflowing backpack. "As a teenager, I had the usual adolescent angst, and I got pulled out of it by a talk radio host in South Florida. Once or twice a week, I would feel myself opening up to new information and ideas. That's what radio can do, whether it's through real conversation or some feature that takes you to a place you've never been."

Radio Free Richmond has no transmitter, no license, no programming. It is an idea, an application sitting in a drawer at the Federal Communications Commission. But Maxwell has an e-mail discussion group with 300 participants, a mailing list of 1,200, and dozens of volunteers eager to help out as deejays, news reporters and talk show hosts.

"I call it radio for the rest of us," says Maxwell, who has heard from Buddhists, atheists, world-beat music fans, liberals and John Birchers, local politicians and neighborhood activists, all of whom want a piece of his airtime, should he ever get any.

For the first time since the 1950s, when FM was a curiosity, a generational cry of "Let's start a radio station!" is sweeping the nation.

It may seem retro for so many people to be clamoring for access to the airwaves when the infinite Internet is just reaching its adolescence. After all, anyone can put a radio station on the Web, and about 10,000 already have. But as Maxwell notes, "Radio is so stone simple and affordable. I can literally walk down an alley and find a working FM radio in a trash can. That's inclusive."

And radio has another advantage that has been almost entirely tossed aside in the rush to embrace satellite and Internet technologies: It is supremely local. "The Internet is worldwide," Maxwell says. "I want stories on my station about the Richmond City Council. The proportion of people on the Web who would care is tiny. The percentage of people in Richmond who will care is in the double digits."

Just as 1970s cable access channels, with their amateur documentaries and gavel-to-gavel coverage of city council meetings, paved the way for C-SPAN and CNN to revolutionize TV news, low-power FM is poised to add protein to the virtually meatless stew that radio news has become (see "Blackout on the Dial," June 1998).

For as little as $ 10,000, including equipment and rent, a church group, an ethnic minority, a political faction or just a gang of radio nerds, music buffs or plain old neighbors can be on the air with a low-power station. The FCC plans to license hundreds of such stations in the next couple of years; already, tens of thousands of groups like Maxwell's, including Navajo tribes, Haitians in Florida, conservative fundamentalist churches, jazz societies, schools and a loose nationwide network of radical, perforated punks are preparing applications.

The government's relatively swift launch of low-power stations (LPFM) was spurred by two opposing forces: the overwhelming wave of media concentration unleashed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which enabled literally a handful of mega-corporations to buy up 4,000 of the nation's 10,000 radio stations in just a couple of years; and the advent of new technologies that make it possible to add multiple voices to a narrowing national media landscape.

The very definition of radio is about to change considerably, as the distinction between the Internet and radio frays vanishes; as satellites that will beam nationwide programming directly to your car and home are put into orbit; and as traditional radio bands develop subcarriers enabling stations to broadcast more than one signal on each frequency.

All these changes will broaden the choice of music and spoken-word programming, providing a broadcast version of Books on Tape, business lectures, inspirational talks and children's stories. And there will be some expansion of audio journalism: Both of the national satellite companies, XM Radio and Sirius, which will beam signals from orbiting transmitters to tiny dishes on your car or windowsill, are busily signing up the likes of the BBC, NPR and Bloomberg News to provide content for their 100-station universes.

But the missing component in this wave of new technologies is local programming, and especially local news. That's where LPFM comes in.

The idea is as old as radio itself. Set up a cheap transmitter, get yourself some folks who want to put on a show and switch it on. Driven by the swift consolidation of the industry and the loss of local programming as the four horsemen of commercial radio -- Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Don Imus and Laura Schlessinger -- came to dominate the dial, FCC Chairman William Kennard surprised the radio establishment by pushing aggressively for a new class of licenses that would build a nationwide system of tiny, very local voices.

Commercial FM stations broadcast with many thousands of watts of power, as many as 300,000 watts, enabling them to be heard over an entire region. Low-power stations will have just 100 watts, enough power to be heard a couple of miles away. Kennard, once a deejay at his college station, declared LPFM to be the "antidote to consolidation."

No one will get rich off LPFM; it will be strictly noncommercial. (Enter $oros money here.) No one will get powerful off LPFM; no person or entity will be permitted to be involved in more than one station. But the large number of requests for applications underscores the idea's appeal.

While the FCC plans to grant licenses in the next few months, the stations still face a hard road, including a strong attempt in Congress to turn back the FCC initiative (see "Lobbying Against Low-power Radio," page 46). Opposition comes primarily from commercial radio stations, some truly worried about the prospect of signals that might interfere with reception of their own programming, others simply suspicious of any alternative to the homogenized musical fare they offer. Huge companies such as Clear Channel, Infinity and Citadel, which have collectively bulked up from 80 stations in 1996 to more than 1,200 today, have managed to block newcomers from the radio dial by bidding up the price of radio frequencies to the same ballpark as major league sports teams.

The anti-low-power campaign is being led by the National Association of Broadcasters and an unlikely ally, NPR, which shocked some of its own member stations and many of its listeners and staff by siding with the commercial stations. Most public stations are clustered near the low end of the FM dial, which is often crowded with public, religious and educational stations. The Washington, D.C.-based network fears that low-power stations will interfere with NPR programming and make it harder for the network to set up translators that would extend its stations' signals to hard-to-reach corners of the country.

That puts the premier provider of radio news in direct confrontation with some of its most dedicated listeners, including people like Maxwell in Richmond, or a Twin Cities ministry planning a low-power station to provide news and public affairs programming for Cambodian and Hmong immigrants, or a New York City collective hoping to go on the air with poetry, feminist talk, neighborhood news, hip-hop music and bicycle repair advice.

Pete TriDish is not exactly William Kennard's idea of the perfect ambassador for low-power FM. More like his nightmare. TriDish, who has stubbornly retained his pseudonym from his days as a radio pirate, is a proud veteran of the Free Radio Movement, a fancy name for the radicals, rockers and radio freaks who have driven the FCC nuts in recent years by building their own transmitters and just going on the air -- no license, no nothing.

But TriDish tired of the underground life. "As pirates, we hit a glass ceiling," he says. "Because for every programmer we had, there was another who couldn't get involved with us because they had kids and couldn't risk arrest, or they had a prior conviction or a shaky green card. We wanted a radio station that would be for everyone, not just for the unreasonably flaky."

The FCC's crackdown on pirates
The agency has been silencing about 150 pirate stations a year lately, which has resulted in some violent confrontations and a lot of ill will. But it was the pirates as much as anyone else who helped make LPFM a reality and who have inspired thousands of others to get into the competition for low-power licenses.

The ultimate expression of that shift to legitimacy is TriDish, whose Prometheus Radio Project has gone mainstream enough to have won $ 25,000 grants from both the Ford and Soros foundations, money that pays for TriDish to wander the country as a laid-back, alternative minstrel preaching the gospel of radio for the people. He helps everyone from schools to churches, political activists to ethnic minorities learn about applying for a license, setting up a station and fighting through the bureaucracy of the FCC.

TriDish looks like a pirate. With his untamed, long beard, T-shirts promoting radical causes and secretive manner, he wouldn't get far in the lobbying frenzy now surrounding the low-power issue on Capitol Hill. But out in the country, where groups ranging from the United Church of Christ in New York to Asian refugees in Wisconsin to anti-corporate activists in California see LPFM as a way to get their perspectives onto the airwaves, TriDish is a cult figure, a hero.

He's constantly watching his back, expecting the forces of commercial broadcasting to sabotage low-power FM, but he occasionally allows himself to envision the radio world to come: "A lot of people are doing this mostly to get 'their music' on the air, but there are also many people who want to tell stories and report their idea of what the news is. Journalism on pirate radio was mostly a lot of people with $ 5 Walkmen going around saying 'Hey, you! What's going on!'

"But on low-power stations, there'll be a redefinition of news. [In-your-face gonzo journalist/activist] Michael Moore's been a big influence on people, confronting companies. Some people will have a traditional nightly newscast, but more than that, you'll hear shows devoted to particular issues."

On TriDish's old pirate station, Radio Mutiny, which was shut down and had its equipment confiscated by the FCC, an ex-convict did a weekly show called "Incarceration Nation" with reports on corrections law and people who were ill-treated by the criminal justice system. Radio Mutiny had no straight newscast, but a menu of public affairs offerings including "Africa Report," whose host had been a combatant in South Africa's battle against apartheid, and shows on health and labor hosted by activists. "Many people on LPFM will have a closer relationship to what they're reporting than a traditional reporter does," TriDish predicts.

Indeed, at the recent Grassroots Radio Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, traditional journalists appeared side by side on panels with activists who ran the media operations for anti-World Trade Organization and anti-World Bank protesters in Seattle and Washington, D.C. Several people spoke of the "newscasts" on Howard Stern's morning raunchfest as a model for delivering news to a nation that has soured on the mid-20th-century model of broadcast news. TriDish himself helped set up the radio center for anti-globalism protesters at the Republican National Convention in his hometown of Philadelphia.

In the world of community radio, no wall separates journalist from activist. And in low-power FM, there is little sympathy for the concept of "professional" journalist. In fact, many in the movement mimic the early revolutionary rhetoric of the Internet, the mid-1990s claims that the Web would eliminate the middleman and bring unfiltered news directly from people to people.

"It's not surprising that most of the low-power applications are from people who want to do Me Radio or My God Radio," TriDish says. "A lot of the applicants are people like me who are tired of having to go downtown in clown uniforms and do stunts to get a few seconds on TV for our issues."

But while TriDish's issues are mainly the national and international causes driving the anti-WTO protests, other low-power advocates are more devoted to replacing what's disappearing from commercial radio -- local news.

"The biggest strength of low-power is going to be bringing back localism, in both news and music," says Glenn Austin, a cofounder of Americans for Radio Diversity, a Minneapolis-based group born after the demise of a commercial rock station that had built a strong following with an overtly counter-cultural mix of local music and politics.

Broadcasting to small clusters of urban neighborhoods or a single small town, low-power stations are designed expressly to promote the localism now fading from the rest of the media landscape. That's why the huge number of religious groups that filed for licenses in the first wave of applications troubles LPFM advocates. TriDish welcomes the applications of individual churches but is troubled by those from national religious organizations. "Emotionally, it's difficult," TriDish says, "because we fought so long and so hard for LPFM, and now these churches just swoop in."

Actually, the evangelical churches filing the largest number of applications may be the best political ally LPFM has, providing a conservative counterweight to the mostly left-of-center community groups that previously dominated the low-power movement. (which must be why it's "emotionally difficult" for TriDish.)

"It's going to be up to the FCC to verify how local these applicants really are," says Carol Pierson, president of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, which represents small noncommercial stations and supports LPFM. "When you see Calvary Church applying for a huge number of licenses, that's not the kind of grassroots applicant that the FCC had in mind," Pierson says.

If LPFM is a success, Pierson believes existing community stations will follow their lead with more local news. "Community stations now are under great pressure to put on minority-language programs and play narrow musical formats," she says. "Low-power could take over those functions and relieve the pressure, letting our stations do more local programming. Local public affairs is going to be what distinguishes us from the rest of the media environment."

But the cultural and intellectual gulf separating many low-power advocates from the traditional concept of journalism should not be underestimated. This is a movement very much driven by a deep sense of alienation from the status quo.

They are college kids (such as Nick Berg?) and ex-'60s radicals, refugees from commercial news operations and true believers who have stayed with community radio despite years of little or no pay. They work in the media but view themselves as very much outside it.

The right and the left use exactly the same words to describe their strategy for supplanting the "mainstream media," which they deride as arrogant, superficial and out of touch: "Media Bypass" is the name of both a right-wing magazine and a left-wing movement. In both cases, the idea is that the only way the ideas and actions of ordinary citizens can find a voice is through alternative media that purport to deliver unwashed messages.

In fact, at both ends of the political spectrum, the alternative media have rapidly moved from grassroots activism to traditional structures. When anti-World Trade Organization protesters set up Independent Media Centers (www.indymedia.org) to produce Web sites, TV and radio productions and even their own newspapers during protests, they opened their facilities to all comers. But as time wore on, it became clear that some reports were far better than others, and that only a few reports were worthy of getting top billing on the homepage and broadcasts. That required editors and editorial policy, and, pretty soon, there was a fairly standard newsroom in operation, even if its inhabitants insist that they make decisions "by consensus" rather than through a hierarchy.

Similarly, on the right, rogue anti-Clinton talk show hosts and Webmeisters have coalesced around a handful of radio syndication services and sites that do business the old-fashioned way -- they aim to turn profits.

Low-power advocates say they want to follow a different model, staying outside the corporate system while following the battle cry of musician and free speech crusader Jello Biafra, who said, "Don't hate the media, become the media."

"Dr. Diogenes," a pseudonym for a member of the Free Radio Twin Cities Collective, a pirate station in Minneapolis, is part of a collective of about 25 people whose station wanders around the dial, always on the run from FCC enforcement agents. Diogenes and his fellow deejays mostly play music -- hip-hop, roots, alternative rock and folk -- but they're also committed to news as they define it. When local hotel workers went on strike, members of the collective attended and taped workers' rallies for airplay. When the Minneapolis City Council proposed to make it illegal to wear gas masks, radio activists who opposed the measure on the grounds that it was aimed at protest movements covered the debate on the pirate station.

"We also use canned media, like 'Counterspin,' " the weekly show from the left-of-center Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Diogenes says, "and stuff we get off the Web, like 'Under Lock and Key,' " a Maoist take on prison issues, or "Church of the Subgenius," programming from an anti-religion religion with a cult following.

The line dividing pirates from licensed stations is sometimes thin indeed. Some pirate stations routinely use programming that also airs on licensed public radio stations and many low-power applicants plan to do the same.

In Oakland, California, producer Kellia Ramares has launched the Radio Internet Story Exchange, an Internet-based storehouse of radio news reports and features posted by producers for pick-up by stations around the country. No money changes hands, but reporters get their work heard by a wider audience and stations get to flesh out newscasts that otherwise struggle to fill their time slot. A similar effort called the A-Infos Radio Project offers a catalog of reports and programs such as a documentary on radiation-poisoned victims of Cold War nuclear testing, a gay newsmagazine, lectures by Ralph Nader and convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal and reports from street protests outside the national political conventions.

That kind of programming may not be exactly what the FCC has in mind; it envisions low-power as a medium that will restore local issues and voices to the airwaves. But the FCC's Kennard shares some of the rhetoric of the radio revolutionaries, speaking of "the haves; the broadcast industry trying to prevent many have-nots, small community and educational organizations from having just a little piece of the pie, just a little piece of the airwaves, which belong to all of the people."

Beyond the rhetoric, the reality of LPFM, assuming it indeed gets on the air, will likely be a blend of disappointment and discovery more of the same old radio fare, albeit with some new flavors of music, plus some real experimentation in nonfiction audio.

"Our public affairs programs often awaken people to take action, to get involved, sometimes to start new organizations to work on specific issues," write Marty Durlin, station manager of KGNU in Boulder, Colorado, and Cathy Melio, former manager of WERU in East Orland, Maine, in a paper on the grassroots radio movement.

But low-power stations will find themselves limited by the same forces that restrict the amount and quality of news heard on existing community stations, most of which rely heavily on volunteers. "The fact in community radio is that very few people come in the door wanting to do journalism," says Sam Fuqua of Boulder's KGNU, a popular and edgy community station. "They usually have an opinion to get across. And even if they want to report, they find that you can produce an interview show in a couple of hours, but to do a seven-minute news piece takes at least eight to 10 hours."

Even at existing stations such as WORT in Madison, which has the luxury of a large complement of volunteers, the daily local news program staff, 20 or so radio amateurs who call themselves the In Our Backyard Collective, "spends a lot of our time rewriting the newspapers," says Rob McClure, a founder of the group.

Fuqua agrees: "We don't like having to do that, but that's our main source. Our state and local news is largely rewrites from the newspapers, without the car crashes and fluffy stories. The hardest thing to get people to do is go out and cover events."

Still, community stations do add value: KGNU stages debates on city issues and airs voice mail from listeners. WORT broadcasts farm news and a preview of the city's multicultural weekly, and has a volunteer who reviews the free food at local potlucks and benefit dinners.

And in a media landscape in which local content is vanishing quickly and listeners and viewers are fleeing in droves, that's something distinctive. TV viewing has dropped by 5 percent in the past year, and radio listening is down by 12 percent in the same period, according to a July study of media use by Fairfield Research, a Nebraska-based survey company. Arbitron, the radio ratings service, finds a smaller decline but agrees on the general trend. The impact of the Internet is certainly one of the reasons for the drop. But while print has held its own (the Fairfield survey found people actually spending a bit more time with print than they did a year ago), broadcast has suffered a continuing loss of public interest and confidence.

That's where low-power advocates see their opportunity. At the Grassroots Radio Conference, community radio producers and managers and low-power advocates screened a video made by the Center for Independent Public Broadcasting, a Washington lobby pushing to halt public TV and radio's dependence on corporate advertising and government aid. The video includes a clip from the movie "Network," in which Peter Finch plays the crazed but right-on TV news anchor who urges his audience to open their windows and join him in shouting their outrage.

As they viewed the clip, this audience of radio people suddenly joined in as one, some laughing, but most quite seriously following Finch's directive: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
-----------------------------------------
Photo, Former radio pirate Pete TriDish travels the nation preaching the gospel of radio for the people.; Photo, Carol Pierson of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters thinks the advent of low- power stations will mean more local news.

Finally, a recent comment by Pete Tridish (aka Dylan Wrynn) against the Iraq war.

Dylan realized that, in order to be that translator, he had to have a voice. However, when he turned to the media, he saw another roadblock. Giant corporations with their own capital interests in mind controlled the public airwaves. Newspapers, television, radio—it was all controlled by a very powerful few. They had successfully convinced the Federal Communications Commission to outlaw low-powered community radio stations, claiming they clouded the high-powered signals. "Take right now for instance, NBC is owned by GE which makes millions manufacturing weapons for this war in Iraq," Wrynn said. "How can we expect them to do anything but serve their shareholders by fanning the flames of such a war?"

Source of excerpt: http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:ga36_Bw1ZlUJ:www.antioch-college.edu/antiochian/archive/Antiochian_sp03
/inneralumnichangesdylan.html+%22pete+tridish%22+changed+name&hl=en

You've been a busy girl! :-) I had read most of it... but this is NEW! Great Find.

"TriDish himself helped set up the radio center for anti-globalism protesters at the Republican National Convention in his hometown of Philadelphia."

So... when Nick Berg "worked at the Republican Convention", he may not have been working for the Republicans, instead working with Tridish. Amazing.

In case you don't see it (as you wade through posts), Bergs partner in Iraq (Aziz) is owner of the website Tridish.com

More "coincidences" to add to the list. Oddly enough, the Enquirer and other tabloids are trying to paint Berg as a U.S. spy. Some Freepers, of course, are buying it. I really should get those bridge deeds printed up...

PROPERTY TRANSFER RECORD FOR PHILADELPHIA COUNTY, PA

Buyer: AZIZ, AZIZ K; BOUAYAD, AMINA (Husband and Wife)
Buyer Mailing Address: (**redacted**) ST, PHILADELPHIA, PA 19115
Seller: AZIZ, AZIZ K
Seller Mailing Address: (**redacted**), PHILADELPHIA, PA 19115
Property Address: (**redacted**) ST, PHILADELPHIA, PA 19139
Sale Date: 9/5/2001
Recorded Date: 10/1/2001
Deed Type: INTRA-FAMILY TRANSACTION
Legal Description: CITY: PHILADELPHIA

PROPERTY TRANSFER RECORD FOR PHILADELPHIA COUNTY, PA

Buyer: BOUAYAD, AMINA (Individual(s))
Buyer Mailing Address: (**redacted**) ST, PHILADELPHIA, PA

Seller: AZIZ, AZIZ K (Minor/Ward/Client); BOUAYAD, AMINA (Agent or Guardian); AZIZ, AMINA a/k/a
Seller Mailing Address: (**redacted**) ST, PHILADELPHIA, PA

Property Address: (**redacted**) ST, PHILADELPHIA, PA
Sale Date: 8/8/2003
Recorded Date: 9/2/2003
Deed Type: INTRA-FAMILY TRANSACTION
Legal Description: CITY: PHILADELPHIA

I don't know if this is the same "Amina Bouayad Aziz" or not.

Iraqi Refugees Support Regime Change
Aired March 8, 2003 - 18:44 ET
RENAY SAN MIGUEL, CNN ANCHOR: Another aspect of a possible war with Iraq, the refugees. Not only the people who would be displaced by the fighting but others who fled the war a decade ago and are still waiting to go home. As CNN's Ben Wedeman tells us, they support removing Iraq's leaders.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN INT'L CORRESPONDENT (voice over): On a cold day in northern Iraq, warmth and the aroma of baking bread. Avine Abass (ph) and her sister-in-law, Bahar (ph), prepare bread for their families, refugees who have fled to the Kurdish stronghold of Sulemanea (ph), from the oil rich region around the city of Kirkuk, still under Iraqi government control.

These refugees hope a U.S. led invasion will allow them to leave this camp and return home. The adults here tell tales of loss, of homes destroyed, lives shattered, loved ones traumatized, maimed or murdered.

Iraqi forces captured Fatima's son, Aflaton (ph), during the 1991 Kurdish uprising. He escaped but not before being tortured. She says he has since gone mad and missing.
Most everyone here says they would return to their old homes if they could, but many of those homes are now occupied by ethnic Arabs. Resettled in Kirkuk as part of Baghdad's program of Arabization (ph).

Some of the refugees squat in this squalid building once used by the traffic police.

Nasda Kareem (ph) lives in the dank, cold dungeon-like basement with her husband and two-year-old son, Shaharahm (ph). She does her best to bail out the rainwater, but she Shaharahm is often ill.

Her neighbor, Amina Aziz, tells of her son, Sarkout (ph), once a soldier in the Iraqi army, arrested by the secret police. She says he was accused of membership in a banned Kurdish group. He too was tortured and lost his mind.

Amidst these searing memories the children bask in ignorance. This is the only life they know.

WEDEMAN (on camera): Cold, wet, miserable and muddy, that is what winters are like in this camp, where the refugees are hoping this winter will be their last here. Ben Wedeman, CNN, Sulemanea, in Northern Iraq.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

Whether or not Aziz K. Aziz is truly anti-Sadaam or not, I don't know. It sure sounds like he is.

If he is, was it Nick Berg's goal to infiltrate the group?

Sulemanea, in Northern Iraq

Is this near the place where NB went on his jaunt to Northern Iraq to visit his aunt's ex-husband?

In case you don't see it (as you wade through posts), Bergs partner in Iraq (Aziz) is owner of the website Tridish.com

Very interesting!

STUNNING! I don't know what to say...you have blown this whole story wide open. The younger Berg is beginning to sound like one of numerous foot-soldiers of a huge movement designed to subvert communication on a massive scale. And sitting right on the top of this pyramid of organisations, there is Soros money and their Hero, Michael Moore.
I'm sitting on my veranda in Australia with my mouth wide open...almost speechless...remembering what Hitler said; He who controls the oil, controls the whole world. Paraphrase that to: 'He who controls communication...' and suddenly my tinfoil hat fits!

Please put me on your ping list, too.

I think it's pretty safe to say we're past the "tin-foil" stage. :-)

I guess this depends on what the meaning of "is" is. :-)

Then a funny thing happened. Tridish got wind that a change was in the air: Then-FCC chairman William Kennard was considering creating a new kind of FM license to provide just the kind of radio access the pirates had been promoting.

http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:eXx4WGw8LpsJ:www.ncs.gov/N5_HP/Customer_Service/XAffairs/
NewService/NCS9803.htm+%22William+Kennard%22+fcc+clinton&hl=en

Kennard to Chair Federal Communications Commission
By Stephen Barrett, Customer Service and Information Assurance Division, OMNCS

William E. Kennard became Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) November 7, 1997 following White House ceremonies. Vice President Al Gore swore in Kennard and three other FCC commissioners after they received Senate confirmation in late October.

Kennard moves to the FCC’s top position after serving as its General Counsel since 1993. President Clinton nominated Kennard last August to replace Reed Hundt who announced last year that he was leaving the FCC a year earlier than anticipated. The Senate confirmed Kennard’s nomination on October 29.

You are SO right! Nothing we can 'dream up' now can be any more unbelievable than the truth. The last thought I had before I went to sleep last night was this whole story was beginning to take the form of a huge pyramid...I asked myself, just who might we find at the top? Thanks to you, I believe we now know.

Wow! Excellent work!

Check out 1482.

Link to

photo of MM with daughter and wife

Ok, I'm a little dizzy, but let me get this straight: Berg was in Iraq to put up low power FM stations, supposedly so Air America(or equivalent)(backed by Moore, Soros et al) could broadcast there and subvert the change-over to democracy?

Excellent Job Nita! So we gots one on the inside of RNC and the other on the outside...and soros/moore at the top. I think that pretty much sums up the main characters. Now...

Miz, don't miss this one...

See post #1,482..nita's found some good stuff..

FREEPERS ARE NOW OFFICIALLY A THINK TANK

Have a nice memorial day!

Nita's blown the lid off this one, methinks. I'm pinging a few more, just in case they weren't on any of the other ping lists.