Via today’s Democracy Now!:
U.S. Marshals Shut Down Radio Free Brattleboro
In Vermont, U.S. Marshals have shut down the low power community radio station Radio Free Brattleboro for operating without a license. … Although the FCC has tried to shut down the station before, Radio Free Brattleboro has received strong support from the community. Last year town voters endorsed a referendum supporting the station by a two-to-one margin. The station’s attorney James Maxwell said “Rfb does not operate in defiance of government, but rather from the belief of its members and listeners that community radio is essential to good government and democratic process.”
In Vermont, U.S. Marshals have shut down the low power community radio station Radio Free Brattleboro for operating without a license. … Although the FCC has tried to shut down the station before, Radio Free Brattleboro has received strong support from the community. Last year town voters endorsed a referendum supporting the station by a two-to-one margin. The station’s attorney James Maxwell said “Rfb does not operate in defiance of government, but rather from the belief of its members and listeners that community radio is essential to good government and democratic process.”
Am I paranoid? China is attempting to force licensing on bloggers. A U.S. judge has ruled that “bloggers do not get the same protections as journalists in revealing their sources.” The Indian gov’t announced recently “that it is seriously considering providing official accreditation to bloggers and other ‘internet journalists’.” (Which is good, right?)
By the way, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) provides a New Legal Guide for Bloggers. “This document informs bloggers of their legal rights including libel law, copyright law, and political advocacy.”
National Public Radio worked with congress to prevent the FCC from enacting a licensing change that would have allowed low power FM community radio. Using the absurd technical argument of “radio interference” (absurd because it is technically inaccurate) they convinced congress to mandate that the FCC revoke its prior decision to allow low power (under 100 watt) radio broadcast to the public. Their actions bespoke of a desire to maintain control over the broadcasting medium at the expense of community and true public radio. Here is NPR’s press release on the matter for balance. –M
What do you think of the absurdly wasteful use of undermanned U.S. Marshall Service manhours to go after a tiny community radio station?
I’m appalled.
I dunno. I suppose it’s no better or worse than the police chasing down and locking up pot-heads instead of violent offenders. In both cases we’re looking at an abrogation of responsibility. But this is endemic to government. The FCC was formed with the mandate to manage a limited radio spectrum for the public good. What have they done? They sell off the spectrum to the highest bidder. They refuse to enforce licensing rules by denying licenses to those private businesses who break its broadcasting in the public trust rules (and instead focus on sexual and profanity standards). They work with industry to close off access to the public airwaves to the citizenry – because that’s the way the rest of our government operates.
What solution is there? Are the libertarians and anarchists right: is government itself an evil to be stifled? Or is it possible to create and enforce a democratic public policy that can both protect minority rights and be scaled to federal size? I have no idea. The founding fathers never envisioned this scale of government and their strategy of dividing the branches of government to force checks and balances is finally breaking apart into a unified political tyranny. This example with the FCC is but a minor symptom of that larger policy divide between the citizenry and our policy-makers. –M
I’m an anarchist on broadasting and the written word. Let it all get out.
Except that i have a big problem with child porn.
When I worked for an ISP in the mid-90s, they believed that every usergroup should be permissible, incl. those devoted to child porn.
I then worked for another ISP that blocked the Usenet groups that displayed child porn … so none of that ISP’s customers had access to those photos. (Although our attempts to track the Usenet groups were futile … they popped up as quickly as we blocked them.)
It’s been about 10 years since I worked for an ISP so I have no idea what current practices are.
What’s right?
Lock the bastards up. There’s a huuuuge difference between free speech and the exchange of violent and prurient images of abused children for deviant purposes. Though I do think censorship is ultimately an unworkable approach. Anonymous communication is just to cheap and easy. The solution is to find and lock up those creators of child porn forthwith. But this is waaaay off-topic for a discussion on the FCC stifling public access to radio. 🙂 –M
What’s particularly irritating about public radio is that in a huge market like suburban Boston, NO station carries Pacifica radio. From Framingham you can easily get: WGBH, WBUR, WERS, and WICN. In nearby local areas you can get about a dozen small college stations.
EVERY SINGLE ONE PLAYS THE SAME NEWS PROGRAMS. Government funded monopoly.
I live in Somerville MA and share your pain. I’ve completely given up on broadcast radio due to the monopolization of both commercial and public broadcasting. It’s all ads, bad music, and talk-radio bullshit. *sigh* However, not to advertise myself, but mind if I recommend Radio Paradise? It’s Internet radio that’s community supported and plays good music (well, good to my ears). *shrug* Worth a shot. –M
Radio Paradise is hooked in with the notorious KPIG, one of the best stations out there. They play pretty much what they want to play, and it’s all worth listening to (check out the playlist on their main page).
They also maintain the Cowboy Cultural Society, an online stream of classic cowboy music.
Now see, this is why I love streaming audio on the Internet. You can’t get this kind of music over the air, and if you can, you can’t count on getting it where you live.
Do you have any good cowboy stories to tell?
Of course I have cowboy stories to tell. Let me just point you to The Cowboy and the Rattlesnake, a retelling of Aesop which was one of my earliest Sunday Griot efforts. Not long after I reposted it on my own weblog, Harry Shearer played Oscar Brown Jr’s version of the story, called The Snake, on Le Show. I’m pretty sure I’d heard it before and forgotten about it until just then.
And somewhere in the dusty cobwebs of my memory I’m sure I could dig up stories about Pecos Bill or the legendary strawberry roan. But the best cowboy story will have to wait until we meet face to face, because it takes quite a while to tell. It’s about Coyote the Trickster, and what happens when he meets up with the World’s Trickin’est Cowboy who wants to challenge Coyote to a trickin’ contest.
you can listen to Air America on WKOX (1200). It’s possible to get at least an overview of what’s going on from Stephanie Miller, Randi Rhodes, and the rest.
I meant to mention that.
Thanks. Didn’t know that…
here in Milwaukee, my NPR station (we actually have good NPR here still, with their own news dept. and local music programming in the evening) is constantly crushed by the signal of the loud “Jack” formatted “Eighties and MORE!” megastation. They must have just upped their output, b/c I can barely listen to the news on my way into work anymore.
Doubt any Marshalls will be knocking on their door for their signal bleed.
I would expect controlling the Internet has a very high priority for those who would control the population. Right now most people are still getting their “news” from the White House press release outlets on TV, radio and newspapers. Once it appears that more people are turning to Internet sources then this outlet will need to be controlled also. What will we have then, email lists?
If this is about the Apple case (the page linked to didn’t have any information about the specific case), that’s a bad misinterpretation. To be more accurate, there is no journalistic protection against revealing sources. Such protections are provided by whistleblower laws. The judge in the Apple case ruled that the whistleblower protections did not apply – that the bloggers’ right to keep their sources secret was overweighed by the need to persecute the criminal contract violation the sources had committed.
If a case did fall under whistleblower protections, I suspect that bloggers would receive the same protection as anyone else.
Again, bloggers are not being held to a different standard from “real” journalists here. If they could simply claim their sources were secret, NDA contracts would suddenly become impossible to enforce. You just post the leaked information on a website and suddenly, you’re a blogger and cannot be forced to disclose your sources in a court of law.
Not RFB! NO!
What will I do without Sheldon L!!!! He rocks my world!!!
Are you saying that you’ve listened to this station? Wow … tell us about it.
Yes, I have listened to RFB, usually on Wednesday nights when Sheldon L was on. (Or, as was more frequently the case, about fifteen minutes late to his broadcast shift as he had to go from work to the studio.)
RFB is (was) basically “anything goes.” Of course, the usual mix of indie rock, bluegrass and such. And every kind of amateurish liberal amateur Democracy Now! type program you could think of. I didn’t hear a whole lot of women broadcasting on the site either, come to think of it. A lot of the programming done by younger people seemed like the aural equivalent of a less-visited liberal blog…
Sheldon L was the Wednesday night DJ at 6 pm, calling himself the Righteous Rogue. He would play quite excellent music (trance, as well as Jimi Hendrix and the latest new indie band he’d discovered), and when he wasn’t playing music, he would spin off onto long, long digressions about holistic health. An avowed Bush hater, Sheldon would return to favorite anti-Bush themes from time to time, usually having to do with the Bush Administration’s plan to do mandatory mental health screening of schoolchildren and then mandatory drug prescriptions to deal with the “problems” found.
Anyhow, the only reason I really listened to the dude was that he has THE most amazing radio voice and delivery. I was probably one of only a handful of people who listened to RFB via the Internet stream. Every once in a while Sheldon would mention that there was one mystery listener out there on the Internet stream. Which was me. And I could never tell him. SIGH.
And now I never will…
Reporters Without Borders
Press release
23 June 2005
THAILAND
Condemnation after closure of websites and community radios
Reporters Without Borders protested as Thaksin Shinawatra’s government demonstrated a toughening stance towards critics, closing several community radios and two alternative news websites in the space of a week. …
http://www.rsf.org
with streaming Internet audio a going concern, in spite of various efforts to kill it, why would anyone risk big fines, equipment forfeiture and possibly jail time for an unlicensed community station? I agree with the sentiment of doing something like Radio Free Brattleboro, but the fact of the matter is the FCC has it within its power to do exactly what they did. Now why they would crack down on a community station that has the support of the community when there are plenty of truckers running illegal linear amplifiers, kids using secondhand ham radios to do pirate broadcasts just north of the 40 meter band, fart noises and pre-recorded crank phone calls on a repeater in the Los Angeles area, and the like that the FCC could be going after, that’s a different question entirely. So is whether it’s right for the Feds to crack down.
But my point is, a station like RFB shouldn’t need to risk the wrath of the FCC when they could easily just go online. There are plenty of older computers out there that could be salvaged from closets, outfitted with Linux and made to run xmms so the otherwise computer-impaired can listen to the stream. Cable TV systems can easily be set up to broadcast FM signals as well.
You seem to know entirely too much about illegal activities.
Some illegal activities, thank you very much.
Having been a radio ham since 1968, I’ve known about activities like this, and more, for some time. By and large radio hams pride themselves on being law-abiding, and one hears stories about those who aren’t quite so upstanding.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ with it.
at the “Adopt a Chinese Blog” thread, to see one creative solution that is actively addressing the problem of censorship.
Where is that thread?
is here:
http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2005/6/23/144027/523