Amy Goodman: This Year’s Best-Kept Secret: The Next Generation of Community Radio

[marmar]

from truthdig:



This Year’s Best-Kept Secret: The Next Generation of Community Radio

Posted on Jul 10, 2013
By Amy Goodman


A microphone and a radio transmitter in the hands of a community organizer imparts power, which some liken to the life-changing impact when humans first tamed fire. That’s why the prospect of 1,000 new community radio stations in the United States, for which the Federal Communications Commission will accept applications this October, is so vital and urgent.

Workers toiling in the hot fields of south-central Florida, near the isolated town of Immokalee, were enduring conditions that U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy called “slavery, plain and simple.” Some worked from dawn to dusk, under the watch of armed guards, earning only $20 a week. Twenty years ago, they began organizing, forming the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Ten years later, working with the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Prometheus Radio Project, the workers started their own radio station, Radio Consciencia, to serve the farmworker community and inform, mobilize and help the struggling workers forge better lives.

As the largest media corporations on the planet have been consolidating during the past two decades, putting the power of the media in fewer hands, there has been a largely unreported flowering of small, local media outlets. An essential component of this sector is community radio, stations that have emerged from the Low-Power FM (LPFM) radio movement. This October, community groups in the U.S. will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to apply to the FCC for an LPFM radio-station license. But the mainstream media are hardly reporting on this critical development.

“This is a historic opportunity for communities all over the country to have a voice over their airwaves,” Jeff Rousset, national organizer of the Prometheus Radio Project, told me on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “The airwaves are supposed to belong to the public. This is a chance for groups to actually own and control their own media outlets.” The Prometheus Radio Project formed in 1998. It was named after the Greek mythological hero who first gave fire to humans to make their lives more bearable. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_years_best-kept_secret_the_next_generation_of_community_radio_20130710/

[raccoon]

1. Bookmarked to read later. nt