The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency that supervises the media market in the United States, announced in January, 2000, that it planned to create a new class of low-power, noncommercial FM radio stations. These stations would be available to community organizations, schools and churches. But Congress — responding to pressure from commercial broadcasters and, sadly, also from National Public Radio — cut back the program with legislation tucked into the budget bill, which is a questionable process itself in such an important free-speech issue. As a result, only 255 licenses, instead of 1,000, will be issued in the first 20 states where the process started, and most cities are excluded.

As a Hungarian, resistance to these small, but beautiful radio stations is surprising and troubling. Noncommercial radio and television stations in the United States have served as models for Hungarian media regulation in our newfound democracy. After the fall of the Berlin wall, we were convinced that the voice of the civic society had to be heard on the media market. The American and European tradition of not-for-profit radio stations was a source of inspiration for liberal lawmakers like myself. In spite of the much-vaunted stereotype of the "clearly commercial" American media system, we found the work of the U.S. public radio and television stations very attractive. They were not state-owned, and they were not commercial.

In 1993 on a remarkable journey to the United States with a friend — who became a member of the Hungarian Radio and Television Board (ORTT) in 1996 — the two of us were fascinated by "radio institutions" like a wooden-house studio at the edge of Louis Armstrong Park in New Orleans, where people from the neighborhood brought their CDs to play music for the surrounding quarters of the city. We understood that the public broadcasting system is also a network of noncommercial stations. We largely missed this type of radio and television station in Hungary.

Back home, pirate radio stations of the early 1990s, like their flagship, Radio Forbidden in Budapest, were fighting not only for the start of the frequency-licensing process, but for access to noncommercial broadcasting as well. They worked toward being not only the consumers of programs, but also the creators of the messages flowing through the air. Our "pirates" (many of them became our friends) even organized an international conference in 1991 to work out the principles of the not-for-profit radio service. The conference, with participants from AMARC, the organization of free radio in Europe, concluded by laying down the main points of needed legislative support for such stations, including guaranted no-bid access to a portion of the airwawes and sufficient financial support. These stations have provided opportunities to talk to discriminated-against groups like Romas (the largest minority in Hungary) and homosexuals, and refreshed the language of radio-talk. Also, Radio Forbidden has been playing the most diverse and up-to-date music in Budapest.

We committed ourselves to the idea that, as with public and commercial broadcasting, community media have a critical role in a lively radio-television scene. During the heated struggles over the supervision of state-owned broadcasters and the licensing of private-use national radio and television airwaves, we were able to pass provisions in the 1995 Hungarian media law that support noncommercial, community broadcasters. Radio Forbidden was legalized. But five years later, the former pirates were off the air because in 2000, only one license was granted for not-for-profit stations in Budapest, and scandalously, neither Radio Forbidden, with its great past, nor Radio Roma, with its undisputable necessity, was issued a license. This "scarcity" of airwaves for community radio can be partly repaired in a new turn of the licensing process in February, 2001, but it remains to be seen how much support this type of radio can gain in Hungary over the long term.

That's why I am disheartened by the difficulties of the low-power radio movement, a broad coalition of U.S. civic organizations. Even with the Federal Communications Commission on their side, they mostly could not overcome the resistance of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), a lobbying group of big broadcasters. The NAB — supported by Michael Powell, the new chair of the FCC, whose view of the issue is the opposite of just-departed chair William Kennard — claimed that the low-power FM stations would have caused interference. But the FCC specifically stated in its January 20, 2000, press release that low-power FM service "will not cause any unacceptable levels of interference to existing radio stations." Stations would have been equipped with the appropriate separation requirements dictated by the engineering data end tests of the FCC.

As a consequence of radically reducing the FCC's low-power radio plan, the diversity of the radio and television programs in this age of huge media mergers will suffer. That would not be the only loss if it would be the end of the story: friends of freedom of speech in emerging democracies would lose an attractive model of proposals for an open media market in their countries. Agents of the centralized communication system will gain an argument. They will point to the United States with a dark smile and ask why idealists are talking about civic access to radio and television frequencies when the leading democracy in the world fails to guarantee that opportunity to its own citizens.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

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