Posted on 02/06/2005 3:00:42 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - After warnings, inspections and finally a raid, 90.9 FM is silent.
Knoxville First Amendment Radio, or KFAR (pronounced "kay-far"), was an unapologetic voice of unlicensed "pirate radio" activism, freewheeling conversation, alternative news like "Democracy Now!" and "Free Speech Radio News" and music since 2001.
But Federal Communications Commission agents and U.S. marshals emptied the station's graffiti-decorated trailer - a former crack house on a hilltop near the University of Tennessee - of radio gear Sept. 14. A poster of Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary, remains on a control room wall.
"Arrrgh! .... ye scoundrels!" flashed the message board on the station's Web site.
"All the FCC did was protect Knoxvillians' right to listen to static. You go there now, and it is nothing," supporter Chris Irwin said of the void on the FM dial once occupied by 100-watt KFAR. "What exactly was the public benefit of crushing this station with less power than a light bulb?"
Two weeks later, Free Radio Santa Cruz in California was raided after operating nearly 10 years without a license. The FCC shut down 250 pirate radio stations of all kinds in 2004, up from 211 the year before. San Francisco Liberation Radio and tiny Radio Free Brattleboro in Vermont, both raided in 2003, continue to wage federal court battles to stay on the air.
The closings come even as the FCC considers allowing more low-power FM licenses for community radio.
Of some 3,200 applications submitted during very brief filing periods in 2000 and 2001, about 1,100 have been granted construction permits, about 260 applications are still pending, and more than 300 stations have been licensed.
"I fully support the mission of the hundreds of LPFM providers throughout the country," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said in a statement. "Low-power FM stations offer a unique opportunity to serve citizens through noncommercial community-based stations, stations that allow small communal and parochial interests to find a voice."
But KFAR never applied for a license. The loose-knit collection of about 50 mostly college-age disc jockeys kept KFAR going on $10-a-month dues. They used on-air pseudonyms like Black-Eyed Susan and Dingo Dog Dave to avoid fines.
"Originally, we were going to apply for a license. We had a nonprofit. We had a board. We were filling out the paperwork," said Irwin, a UT law student.
But after the FCC opened the door to low-power FM licenses in 2000, Congress adopted restrictions urged by traditional broadcasters. The National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio wanted to ensure the signals of the new little stations didn't interfere with big existing ones. So under a so-called "third adjacent channel" rule, no new station could be closer than three positions on the dial from an existing station.
"Basically it made it so that really low-power stations could only operate in very rural areas where there weren't listeners, so they wouldn't cut into any major markets," said Dylan Wrynn, otherwise known as Pete Tridish (pronounced "petri dish"), a former radio pirate now with the Prometheus Radio Project in Philadelphia, which advises community radio startups.
"Maybe they could have gotten a low-power station, but it is really pretty dubious," Wrynn said of KFAR. "There are about a dozen ways they could have been stopped from doing it legally through really no fault of their own."
The Knoxville market isn't huge. It ranked 71st largest in the country in the latest Arbitron ratings with a population of 620,000. But with 21 FM stations on the air, the dial apparently was full under the third-channel adjacency standard.
So in late 2001 KFAR started broadcasting anyway as an act of civil disobedience.
Two years later, an independent study commissioned by the FCC for Congress concluded the third-channel rule was overreaching.
The FCC proposed going back to its original plan of requiring separation by only two clicks on the FM dial instead of three - a standard that could allow hundreds of additional stations.
Legislation to make the change, sponsored by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., stalled in the Senate last fall.
Tim Berry, chief engineer for five Knoxville radio stations once owned locally but sold to Citadel Broadcasting Corp. of Las Vegas in 2000, has no sympathy for KFAR, even though the pirate station never interfered with his stations' signals.
"If you dance to the music, eventually you are going to have to pay the fiddler. If you fire up a radio station illegally without a license, eventually the commission is going to shut you down," he said.
"If the (McCain-Leahy) legislation were passed ..., yes, I believe there would be some more (stations) that would be eligible," Berry said, but noted, "There already are some low-power FMs on, and they did so legally. They didn't fire up and get mad when they got shut down."
The FCC closed KFAR on a complaint from the FBI.
Special Agent R. Joe Clark, who heads the FBI's Knoxville office, sent the FCC a letter about KFAR in January 2004. The FBI refused to release Clark's letter to The Associated Press without a formal Freedom of Information Act request to Washington.
Knoxville FBI spokesman Gary Kidder said Clark was only passing on a tip to the appropriate agency from the FBI's local Joint Terrorism Task Force.
David Icove, a former FBI Academy instructor now working for the Tennessee Valley Authority's police agency, is a member of the task force. He played a small role in the KFAR probe. Icove listened to the radio in April and June to confirm that KFAR was still on the air after FCC warnings, according to an affidavit from FCC investigator Eric Rice.
"KFAR was shut down for its content," said Irwin, who believes the station was shuttered for its criticism of TVA's nuclear power plants and the government's nuclear bomb-building factory in nearby Oak Ridge.
But the FCC complaint simply says the station was closed for being unlicensed, after it was warned and tests determined the station was transmitting at 5,935 times the allowable limit. Its signal could be picked up from more than five miles away, the FCC said. A licensed low-power FM station typically reaches about 3.5 miles.
Since the shutdown, KFAR has continued an abbreviated broadcast on the Internet under a new name, Community Radio of Knoxville, or CRoK, and looks for other opportunities.
"KFAR is going to continue to survive as an idea," Irwin said, "until we can figure out some way of getting the people of Knoxville access to what belongs to them - our airwaves."
Somehow, this doesn't come as a surprise.
Free-thinkers - unless they're not on The Agenda.
Good for the FCC to seek out and destroy the Left Wing Pirate radio stations.
Knoxville First Amendment Radio, or KFAR (pronounced "kay-far"), was an unapologetic voice of unlicensed "pirate radio" activism, freewheeling conversation, alternative news like "Democracy Now!" and "Free Speech Radio News" and music since 2001.
But Federal Communications Commission agents and U.S. marshals emptied the station's graffiti-decorated trailer - a former crack house on a hilltop near the University of Tennessee - of radio gear Sept. 14. A poster of Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary, remains on a control room wall.
All ye who suppose that the First Amendment is applicable to broadcasting, take note.And journalism which does not have First Amendment protection is inherently elitist and illegitimate.
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
Hope you are just as jubilant when right wing stations are shut down.
The Constitution does not provide for a levy on free speech, even though the feds have somehow turned this into yet another tax base.
Wise up. An unlicensed radio station, be it left OR right wing, has no business broadcasting. And it isn't like KFAR was raided by storm troopers or something, they were warned multiple times about the illegal nature of their broadcasting operation. They chose to thumb their nose at the law, and they were shut down and rightly so. And I haven't even touched the public safety issue of unlicensed radio (or TV) broadcasting.
>Hope you are just as jubilant when right wing stations are shut down.
There are right wing stations? There are the some extremist nut cases who broadcast on short wave--these guys are hardly mainstream conservatives--but who is spreading the word on FM? All the "community" stations I've heard and heard of strictly program Berkeley-Maoist propaganda.
There are pirate, or I should say, unlicensed stations here in Boston...but they are on the extended (1600-1700) AM band, run by Caribs and mostly music. You won't hear them out in Framingham.
And journalism which does not have First Amendment protection is inherently elitist and illegitimate.
No matter how much you pay for the property, you do not own that property unless you have gotten deed for it from the Government.
And no matter how much you have paid for the equipment you do not own a radio stations unless you have a governmetn issued license for that radio station.
If you don't have an automobile license you can't even drive around shouting out the car window.
Try going to a public place with a bull horn and start making your freedom of speech rant. You're free speech is disturbing the peace.
You do not and have never had a constitutional right to all methods of speech delivery. In fact you can't even print a newspaper and put them in peoples mail boxes unless you buy the postage and have the post office deliver your papers.
You can't use radio bandwith you do not have authority to use, and you can't use mail boxes to deliver your newspaper. If you want to reach people using radio waves you have to get a license. If you want to reach people using a newspaper and their mail boxes you have to buy the stamps and have the government deliver the message.
Using illegal methods of delivery is not free speech. It is criminal theft of property.
This method was popularly used by college radio stations and people highly versed in radio technology. I know this because I got my "start" in radio announcing at the age of 16, having known one of these "geeks"; later, I worked at a college radio station which employed this technology, before going into commercial broadcasting.
I haven't kept track of this and was just wondering whether this is still done. Anyone know?
Can we get a translator on isle 7?
He came on at midnight right after a black gospel program and began each show with a commercial for 8x10 color autographed pictures of Jesus Christ
Why? Who owns air? Tell me why this is not just another levy by the government to collect tax on something it doesn't own, like the shed in your back yard.
'Tis called 'carrier current' and it's still a viable method of small-area AM broadcasting. Doesn't pass through transformers though, so you WILL have a rather limited area unless you have several transmitters.
BTTT
"Using illegal methods of delivery is not free speech. It is criminal theft of property"
Well, I don't know about theft, but it's not a good idea to let unlicensed stations operate unmolested, because then you'll soon have chaos.
That said, LPFM is a great idea, as "conventional" FM stations (combined into large companies and greatly automated) do not provide the value to their respective communities as was originally intended.
The NAB is a little too cartel-like in their effective opposition to LPFM......but they have a lot of experience greasing the political machine.
I went XM 6 months ago and hardly ever touch the FM dial anymore, still, there is no way local stations operated at low power could hurt the communities they serve.
The FCC will eventually figure out how to make it happen despite the bought politicians that are preventing it now.
Finally, a sane person. I thought I was alone.
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