In its 10th year, the Prometheus Radio Project has been building low power FM (LPFM) radio stations with farm workers, civil rights organizations, and neighborhood collectives -- basically any underdog community group that wants a slice of the increasingly consolidated media. In their efforts to promote and maintain LPFMs as independent community forums, Prometheus trains community members, builds (even constructs) stations, and works with Congress and the FCC to "make sure you don’t have to be Clear Channel to own a radio station." At SILVERDOCS 2008, The Independent's Randi Cecchine spoke with Pete Tridish, Prometheus founder and its director of electromagnetism, about the organization's mission, history, and legal battles.

What are the current rules about LPFM radio?

LPFM was finally passed in 2000 as an afterthought to radio policy, but because of the small power of the station, there was room in most urban areas for one. Unfortunately, a concerted effort by National Public Radio (NPR) and NPB managed to cork it up so only the smallest towns could get low power radios… [We're] currently trying to pass a bill in Congress to allow us to go back to the original FCC vision of LPFM, that there would be LPFMs in just about all the major cities. In the past 10 years we’ve been building stations in smaller towns because we’ve been blocked by the National Association of Broadcasters and NPR.

Are there any urban LPFM radio stations?

No, there never have been, the FCC was going to give out stations in [major] cities, but a bill was passed in 2000 that took away the FCC’s authority over the spectrum. They can keep on giving out full power, but not in urban areas until there is a study and it is proven that low power stations won’t cause interference to full power broadcasters. Of course, that study was conducted, and it showed that what everyone knew from the beginning -- 100 watt channels don’t cause interference -- but we have to pass another act of Congress in order to give the FCC back its authority. There is still pirate radio. One in Boston is getting a lot of attention lately -- Touch FM.

There’s still ‘pirate’ radio -- like in the Haitian community? What’s the penalty for that?

$17,000 for an unlicensed broadcast.

What did you think of the Beyond Broadcast conference at SILVERDOCS?

I found it funny because for the past 20 years public broadcasting has been professionalizing, and the advice from consultants is fire your volunteers, let them answer phones near pledge drive, but don’t let them near the newsroom, get rid of the neighborhood talk show…just take the NPR feed, make higher quality content, and you’ll make more money.

A lot of community stations are embattled with that advice -- they say, we like our volunteers, they make great news producers, they are the lifeblood of station. Now all of the sudden with social media, we see these soul-searching public radio and TV people saying, "Oh no, what are we going to do? MySpace will be our death! Who is going to take care of quality?" Whereas for us, we don’t have that kind of capital or resources. Our stations have grown accustomed over the past 30 years to asking: How would a community govern a media outlet? How do you do the training you need to get good quality content? How do you do things take to make station sound good? How do you deal with hate speech or the one in 30 people who is a crank?

You are talking about bottom up versus top down?

The old problem of community media was the FCC gave all these licenses to corporations and then left one for everyone else, where you could have your two-hour show on Yugoslavian hip hop. Tthe problem becomes: how do people learn to share?

A lot of people are worried about the bloggers! People are worried that a dude in fuzzy slippers is sitting at home making shit up! That’s how people see the public as being engaged.

Because people go through [LPFM] training together, they have been encouraged to collaborate on shows together, they’ve been taught to think of media production as a voluntary, collaborative effort versus purely personal experience…I’m hoping this will bring some good habits into the world of social media.

How are you guys funded?

It’s a combo -- we build stations for hire; we get some grant funding; individual donations like any nonprofit. The stations raise funds the same way community stations always have: pledge drives, underwriting, grants, donations.

One way that we do well is by being a little gutsy. We sued the FCC over media ownership rules and we beat them in 2003-2004 so, while that isn’t exactly a career building move, especially for people who want things from the FCC, it added to our profile. It helped to dramatize that here we were a little community group that wants one little radio station in their little town.

Who was your attorney?

Media Access Project in DC. We were part of a big coalition as the plaintiffs.

We’d do it again in a second. Three of us worked in a basement. [It was] us and our lawyers against Fox, ABC, GE, the FCC, and billions of dollars. It was an exciting thing for us to be a part of. Ultimately, it didn’t make anything better, but it didn’t allow it to get worse.

How are you organized as a group and how do you pay yourselves?

We are a collective of seven staff who each earns $11 an hour and we have about 4-6 interns and we pay them some too.

Do you have health insurance?

We do have health insurance. We make decisions about money by consensus.

Do you identify as an anarchist and what does that term mean to you?

I do. We all are certainly influenced by anarchists; it's deep in the DNA of the organization. A lot of what we do is make very, very small improvements in broadcast law, because we think that if you squawk open the window and get a broader cross section of society that is able to get access to broadcasting, that can create more social changes. Some people don’t understand why we do it [versus Internet] -- but when you work with farm workers and radio is what they use, and that’s what they want -- they want broadcast.

Do you have any thoughts on commercial versus non-commercial models in media?

We focus on non-commercial stations, not against commercials themselves. When we realized that in most places there is only room for two or three or four more stations on the dial, we felt like with those last couple of channels better to make them non-commercial because that would be a channel that a bunch of different people from different walks of life could share.

A lot of [the distinctions] are up for grabs in the new media...people will have to come up with deeper principled ideas about what the value of the media is, how it is funded, how it compromises or doesn’t compromise what you can do.

Can you explain the choice to pay everyone $11/hr regardless of level of involvement/experience?

I find it easier to value things based on an egalitarian idea simply because the other model that people have is markets. There are often distortions in the way that markets value all kinds of things, including people’s labor. I don’t see my work as much more inherently valuable to society than the work of a farm worker, and considering that I do communications law, more or less, the people who do similar to what I do make $300/hr…but there’s no way I can get $300/hr for what we are doing. I find [equal pay to be] more intuitive to all of us in the organization. What money we can find to do the work we split as equally as we can and take it from there.

But I guess for me it means making a choice not to grow up…

Related Links:

The Prometheus Radio Project: www.prometheusradio.org [1]

TouchFM: www.touchfm.org [2]

Photo credit: JJ Tiziou Photography www.jjtiziou.net [3]