For the first time in a long time it looks as if the air waves might open up for independent broadcasters...might! - and that's the crucial point.

Since radio started many decades ago as an independent movement of hobbyist radio pioneers, it has been gradually taken over by governmental and corporate institutions. As always: the war industry played a major role and the government basically squatted all air waves throughout both wars and never bothered giving them back. And what currently seems to be the trend on the internet has a long tradition for radio space: centralised media conglomerates have concentrated their power over electro-megnetic airwaves for commercial use - and commercial use only.

In the USA this concentration comes together at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). But for the first time the tables turned in November '97 when the FCC were ordered to explain to the federal district court in San Francisco why shutting down a Californian based low-power broadcaster would not violate the First Amendment. The broadcaster in court was (and is) Free Radio Berkeley, based in California and backed up by the National Lawyers Guild. Stephen Dunifer - founder of FRB in 1993 - works with about 90 volunteers and 30-watt transmitters which reach about 10 miles. The FCC are currently considering licensing stations which operate at 1 watt or less (see Crash Course) which would transmit a signal within few square miles.

Micro Power Broadcasting (see T-shirts on ants in print issue) is a term coined by Mbana Kantako of Black Liberation Radio in Springfield, Illinois, in the late 1980s. Access Denies also features extracts from a paper by the National Lawyer's Guild Committee on Democratic Communications and the Stephen Dunifer Legal Defence Team, presented by Luis Hiken to the National Association of Broadcasters, April 6, 1998, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Free Radio Berkeley [http://www.freeradio.org]
NLG [http://www.368Hayes.com/nlg.cdc.html]
[http://www.radio4all.org]
FCC [http://www.fcc.gov]

Crash Media [crashmedia@yourserver.co.uk]