Radio Free America

By Margot Hornblower/Las Vegas

More than 100,000 prosperous conventioneers registered here last week for the broadcasting industry's annual trade bash. They included engineers, ad salesmen, station execs, computer techies, disk jockeys, videographers, all wearing National Association of Broadcasters badges, most of them basking in record profits.

They paid little heed to a score of boisterous protesters enacting an oddly surreal, '60s-style pageant outside the vast convention hall: long-haired, body-pierced youths waved hand-painted signs with such slogans as SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL and DON'T LET THEM NAB OUR AIRWAVES; a 30-ft. red, white and blue banner proclaimed MICROPOWER; and a red-bearded man in sandals and beret cried out, "Communication is your divine right whether you're a human being or a dog or a lizard! Bring back the village square! Let microtransmitters bloom in every town and city!"

But behind the scenes of this little time warp, a vast drama is unfolding. Since passage of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, 4,000 of the 11,000 radio stations in the U.S. have changed hands, many of them gobbled up by small chains or media conglomerates. Result: a rapid dwindling of local programming in favor of standardized music, talk and news, often packaged in distant corporate headquarters. "People are totally offended by what's on the air," attorney Louis Hiken told an NAB panel last week, deploring coast-to-coast "easy-listening stations selling Dodge Caravans, beer and tampons."

The dearth of community broadcasting has spurred a sudden proliferation of microbroadcasters, renegade radio buffs who mount their own low-wattage stations, flouting FCC licensing rules. Between 500 and 1,000 are estimated to be operating nationwide, up from a handful five years ago. Hence, the rebels on the Las Vegas Convention Center sidewalk, whose own three-day counterconvention, dubbed "Fear and Transmitting," took place in a rundown Unitarian Fellowship hall across town and was catered by Food Not Bombs, a group that collects unused groceries from supermarkets and restaurants to be served to the homeless. Workshops on legal defenses against FCC equipment seizures and on how to send programs over the Internet drew guerrilla broadcasters from eight Western and Midwestern states--mirroring a similar East Coast conference held in Philadelphia a week earlier.

Five years ago, an eco-activist and self-taught electronics whiz named Stephen Dunifer founded Free Radio Berkeley, trekking up into the hills behind the city and transmitting out of his backpack one night a week with home-built equipment. Soon, with the help of volunteers, Dunifer, 46, was selling kits around the country, enabling anyone who could raise a few hundred dollars to launch a station with a transmitter powered by fewer watts than a light bulb, often covering a radius of only a few miles. Dunifer co-edited a book, Seizing the Airwaves, and mounted a how-to Website www.radio4all.org) When the FCC sought an injunction against his station (motto: "Turn On, Tune In, Take Over"), a federal judge in Oakland, Calif., turned the agency down on First Amendment grounds. "This is about free speech," says Dunifer, presiding at the guerrilla gathering. "The FCC excludes all but the wealthy from having a voice. It should open the spectrum to noncommercial community radio."

Chatting over vegetarian goodies in the Unitarian meeting room last week were a 25-year-old Mexican American with the radio handle "Bedlam," whose Los Angeles station, Radio Clandestino, broadcasts leftist Chicano fare; Rick Strawcutter, a Fundamentalist pastor from Adrian, Mich., who is battling the FCC in federal court for the right to air right-winger Bo Gritz and rail against income tax; two guys from Radio Free Bakersfield who play the homegrown punk-rock bands the commercial stations ignore; and a 19-year-old Milwaukee, Wis., waitress with pink-and-purple hair who reads from Winnie-the-Pooh on her Radio Free Bob children's hour. "There's no difference between microradio and the printing presses of the Founding Fathers that were outlawed by the British government," says "Brad," 27, a bike messenger who reads his poetry on Steal This Radio, a 20-watt station on New York City's Lower East Side.

He was not invited to a panel discussion taking place across town: FCC officials and industry lawyers drew 150 legit broadcasters with the question, "Pirate Radio Stations: Will They Be Walking the Plank?"