In September, the Bush administering was on the border of acceptance the nation's better media companies to added absorb the accessible airwaves. New rules that were to be implemented by the Federal Communications Commission would accept accustomed media owners to go on a affairs spree, enabling a individual aggregation to ascendancy all of a market's airwaves.
Then a above radio charlatan and his canaille political accumulation took on the government -- and won. The Prometheus Radio Project sued the FCC, arguing that the new rules would accomplish it harder for another choir to get on the air. In September a federal cloister agreed, briefly blocking the changes.Pete Tridish, the baton of Prometheus, got his alpha as a media activist in 1998, if the FCC raided his pirate-broadcast flat in Philadelphia and confiscated his broken-down transmitter. "As air-conditioned as it was to do charlatan radio, I accomplished the broadcasts shouldn't accept to be an act of defiance," says Tridish, now thirty-three. "They should be a basal right."
Although Prometheus is run out of a abbey basement, it has become a almighty backer of grass-roots radio. "They amalgamate a genuine, hands-on compassionate of the affair with a arresting composure in ambidextrous with Washington policymakers," says Andrew Schwartzman, CEO of the Media Access Project, who recruited Prometheus to claiming the media rules. "I was like, 'Sue the FCC?'" Tridish recalls. "'Of course!'"
The cloister cardinal was in fact the additional achievement for Prometheus. Facing burden from the radio activists, the FCC in August promised to accelerate applications from 1,200 nonprofits acquisitive to alpha low-power radio stations. Thanks to Prometheus, a civil-rights accumulation in Opelousas, Louisiana, now has a 100-watt base that appearance bounded zydeco bands, and an ecology accumulation on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland broadcasts a mix of folk, bluegrass, electronica and punk.
The achievement didn't appear after sacrifice, though. For his big day in cloister adjoin the FCC, Tridish had to get dressed up. That meant addition his accepted jeans with a accepted shirt and atramentous sneakers "that can affectionate of affected it" as loafers. "I don't accept a moral affair about suits," he says. "I just don't own one."
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