AM Broadcasters Must Fight for Survival or Be Forced Over the 'Buffalo Jump'

[Commentary] In the days before guns and horses, Native Americans used a "buffalo jump" to harvest Bison in mass quantities. They would stampede the animals over cliffs and spear them to death when they fell upon the rocks below. Figuratively speaking, AM radio faces a similar fate.

Like the Bison, a certain number of AM stations are driven over the cliff each year but unlike the Native Americans, the Federal Communications Commission doesn't care enough to sustain the remaining herd.

We must come to grips with reality. The FCC has waited too long to act on the problems facing the AM band, and the agency has made so many wrong and irreversible decisions that the AM band can't be sustained in the long term.

Those of us who face this dismal future must insist in the strongest possible way that the FCC use its regulatory authority to save the diversity of programming produced and broadcast by AM stations, for it's too late to save the AM radio band.

As licensee of KCAA Radio, a standalone AM station, I can clearly see the buffalo jump ahead and I refuse to be stampeded over it. I will not sit quietly and meekly and accept the slow and certain demise of AM radio while the FCC does nothing with dozens of FM frequencies below 87.5 FM that should provide AM stations with a new home.

It's time for the Congress and the FCC to pause it's love affair with inefficient point to point communication and realize that the most efficient form of mass communication and spectrum utilization continues to be point to multipoint terrestrial radio, and unless the AM band is migrated to FM very soon, the opportunity to expand the band will be gone forever. In my opinion, this will require Congressional action. There is only one logical way to "cure" the problems of AM radio and that's to migrate all AM stations to FM frequencies below 87.5 FM. I am stupified that this has not happened.

[Lundgren is Founder and CEO, KCAA Radio, the first affiliate of Air America]