Read this: Stealing Back the Airwaves
Please don’t call Stephen Dunifer a pirate. He’s a microbroadcaster, or, at least, a former one. As Dunifer tells it, the term “pirate radio,” though once a badge of honor, is misleading. Pirates are criminals, he might tell you, while microbroadcasters are Tom Paine-like patriots. Dunifer dreams of reclaiming the airwaves, neighborhood by neighborhood, from the corporate powers that be. To that end, he’s spent the past several years training would-be do-it-yourself broadcasters.
This is a parenthetical aside in the rather convoluted Auckland LPFM Cold War that’s been going on. I was planning to cover the whole issue in a three-parter (trilogies are so hip), and I’ve written parts I and II below.
Sadly, the debate is not resolved and there have been some other developments (including the emergence of a rogue 88.1FM broadcast from the general direction of Newton).
So let’s call this The LPFM Cold War – Part 2(a)
Have a read of the article I link to above. Pete Tridish (say ‘petri dish’) lives in a country where building your own radio station is against the law. He has a vision of what LPFM radio could be, which is almost the opposite of what we have here in a country where low power broadcasting is not only legal, but is, in fact, entirely open slather.
What I saw of the kind of public radio Petri has in mind while I was in the USA last year is just staggering. WORT-FM is an archetype of the free-speech, alternative voices, citizen’s rights, underground politics style of broadcasting that American counter-culture is capable of producing.
We have the absolute right to start something like that here. Any New Zealand citizen who wants to broadcast, can broadcast. We can have our say. Discuss radical politics. Unpick media bias. Fill the airwaves with genuinely interesting people talking about genuinely interesting things without fear or favour. No government intervention, no commercial pressure. Real public radio on an utterly local level.
And so what do we do? We set up music formats in opposition to similar music formats adjacent to us on the dial in the same tiny geographic location, and compete frantically for sponsorship money and advertising revenue – just like the guys in the big sandpit across the dial.
The more I think about this issue, the more I’m convinced that one further criteria needs to be added to the General User’s Radio Licence regulation: LPFMs in New Zealand should be required to be non-profit organisations.
What do you think?
