Out of Thin Air

OUT OF THIN AIR
[SOURCE: Columbia Journalism Review, AUTHOR: Daniel Schulman]
Starting in the early 1990s, translators, or repeaters as they’re sometimes known, began to take on a new purpose. For noncommercial broadcasters, whom the FCC allows to feed certain repeaters via satellite, they have proved a low-cost way (no staff, minimal equipment and overhead) to rapidly establish a broad radio presence. A translator setup typically runs between $4,000 and $10,000 (not including the cost of leasing space on a radio tower, on which the device’s antenna is situated), and, with a satellite uplink, a broadcaster can beam its programming to any number of translators simultaneously. Evangelical Christian organizations in particular have seized on this model as a means of spreading the gospel. And they have prospered. The Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association is an organization that was recently in the news when it spearheaded a campaign to stop Ford, the automobile manufacturer, from advertising its products in gay and lesbian magazines. Wildmon first learned of the FCC’s decision to allow noncommercial broadcasters to beam programming via satellite to translators in the late 1980s. He immediately grasped how this could benefit his organization’s broadcast ambitions and, by extension, advance the group’s conservative agenda. Within four years, between 1993 and 1997, the American Family Association was broadcasting on 156 stations in twenty-seven states. Its broadcast arm, American Family Radio, boasts on its Web site that translators allowed the organization to build “more stations in a shorter period of time than any other broadcaster in the history of broadcasting.” Relying heavily on translators, Christian organizations such as the Educational Media Foundation and Calvary Satellite Network International (CSN) have enjoyed equally impressive growth. “You can do this dirt-cheap and the fact is you avoid any ownership limits,” said Harold Feld, the senior vice president of the Media Access Project, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm that specializes in telecommunications. The FCC has long been warned that this loophole could be exploited to create national radio networks, according to Feld, but the Commission has dismissed those concerns as “speculative and alarmist.” He added, “The sad truth is that the agency is not very imaginative about these sorts of things.” But even now that the practice has moved well beyond the realm of imagination, with broadcasters employing hundreds of translators to forge nationwide footprints, the FCC, seemingly unperturbed, has taken no action to discourage it.
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/2/Schulman.asp?printerfriendly=yes