Interview With Doug Brewer, 'The Party Pirate', 12/29/99
Q: Tell us about your difficulties in trying to get a license. Is it really that hard to get a license for 100 watts or greater?
DB: You can get a license above a hundred watts if you're a mega-corporation. If you're just an individual, you can't. I have attempted to get several different licenses as special temporary authorities from the FCC. No matter how much money or how much time you spend on one of these things, the FCC's not gonna allow you to do that 'cause you're not one of the "Gotrocks" corporations.
There's a collusion set up between the government and the corporations that only allows people who are already "in" to play the game. It's sort of like not recruiting new players for a football team. This is especially true in larger markets of thirty stations or more. If you're in Podunk as a individual, you can possibly get a license, and then a mega-corporation will probably come along and buy the frequency anyway.
Q: How much did it cost to apply?
DB: In theory, I applied for a non-commercial educational station license, even though the only educational purposes I used it for was the broadcast school which I teach here. Broadcasting is my life! As far as the engineering, consulting, and legal costs, it can literally run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, usually anywhere between fifty and a hundred grand. It didn't cost me that, because I did all my own engineering and consulting. I suspect that even if I had paid fifty thousand dollars to a Washington lawyer to sit at the FCC with my license application, I still wouldn't have gotten it, because I'm not one of the Hicks Brothers, Capstars, JCOR's, or other large national media corporations. It's really a shame. Even NPR and Pacifica are corporations.
Moody Bible College owns every non-commercial frequency in the entire state of Florida! Now I'm not saying that religion's a bad thing. I'm a spiritual person, and I believe that there is a Creator of some sort. You can call him God or Buddah or what have you, but I believe that there is a higher power, it doesn't necessarily make me a Christian or a Jew. What it makes me is a person with spirituality. But these people are corprately monopolizing the airwaves for God! Okay? Let's just put it right to the bottom line. And they put as much money into the FCC's pocket as some of the bigger corporate entities. That's why they have all the non-com bands, with the rest of the frequencies taken over by all the other corporations.
The protocol in this scenario is: Pay to play! If you have the money to buy the Congress, the Senate, and the people that pay the FCC, the FCC will absolutely go right along with you as long as you can keep paying. If you don't have the money, you get your stuff stolen, you get harassed, you get letters and fines that you can never pay: $11,000 per verified occurrence of an infraction.
Q: What was the broadcast content of "The Party Pirate" while it was in operation?
DB: Essentially, as a community radio station, we would have things as simple as "Joe Blow's having a yard sale" all the way up to current weather reports, and since we're very close to the University of South Florida and very in touch with the college kids, we'd play the music that they wanted to hear.
Here's an outstanding example of the kind of community radio we were doing: When they were spraying Malathion from DC3's over the community, we went out with our remote van and covered all the demonstrations, and out to the spray area site and got sound bites from residents, and sent them back to the station, live. We were the only station to do this. The regulated media were NOT informing the public correctly. Malathion IS, by God, poison! In our area alone, countless thousands of pets died or became ill, and two or three children and several elderly also fell ill. Not to mention the countless thousands of dollars worth of damage to automotive paint finishes!! We were the only station that was reporting honestly. We weren't taking the government's report and saying "Malathion is safe when applied in this manner." That's bulls#@t!! That's why we need community radio, not regulated radio. The truth needs to come out. The government is working for the government -- and the corporations. That's what it's all about.
Q: Other than the regulated and/or commercial broadcasters, who had complained about interference?
DB: The simple one word answer was NOBODY.
As a matter of fact, we've gotten kudos from the Temple Terrace Police Department and the Hillsborough County Sherriff, as well as our many devoted listeners. So nobody.
Q: Please define the term "80-90 stations".
DB: Another open door provided by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which allowed licensed broadcasters to exceed their market limitations. The way it was originally set up in the Communications Act of 1934, the owner of a newspaper could only run one radio and one TV station, (or two radio and two TV stations, and so on proportionately, depending on the market size). This was an anti-monopoly clause for media. Now it's gone beyond a duopoly. In the Tampa market, JCOR had some stations bought by Clear Channel, who previously owned three or four stations. Now Clear Channel owns fourteen in the area, and they're forced to sell because they've exceeded their cap limit of eight radio, two TV stations, and a newspaper.
Now don't think for a minute, that if I as an individual owned eight radio stations, that I could transfer ownership of some of them to my buddy Joe Blow, make it look like they'd been sold to him, but in effect still keep them. The corporations would never do that, right? Bulls#@t, that's what they're doing right now. JCOR and Clear Channel, they're in bed together, they just open up a joint venture, who cares if they call it Bob Lewis Inc., they still hold all the properties.
80-90 also allowed what is known as a "drop-in." You can throw the rules out the window if you're a corporate broadcaster! You can put a radio station on the air without a construction permit, change your antenna's location and height without an STA, take your power up or down, and so on. 80-90 essentially opened up the entire FM band, and most of the television band, to theives. Corporate greedy theives! The FCC pretty much said, "Here, you guys have got the money, you go out and do it yourselves. We don't need to regulate that. Drop a station in here, move a station over there, go from 50 to 100,000 watts, we don't give a damn, just send us a paper that says you're gonna do it." 80-90 is the downfall of diversified radio and television. That's what it's all about.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 should have been repealed before it was ever in. It allowed the theives to come in, and the most greed wins. Greed is all these guys are about.
Q: What about community broadcasting, usually on the left side of the band?
DB: There is none!! Moody Bible College owns the non-com band in Tampa except for 88.5 which is owned by Stubblefield. There's no other channels here in Tampa. And it's happening in your city the same way. Major non-profit corporate conglomerates are just exactly the same as the for-profit ones. There's no difference! The non-com band is now mostly religious, with few exceptions.
Q: Didn't "Party Pirate" score in the Arbitron ratings, albeit by proxy?
This may have been our downfall, part of the serious things that started happening in 1996. We started hitting the Arbitrons, first showing up in the diary notes, then actually showing up in the Arbs as another call sign, that of a radio station 80 miles away that often can't be heard here! We were pulling a 4 share (!!) and beating 5 AM stations and 2 FM! With a freaking 100 watt radio station on a hill in Temple Terrace!
We broadcasted at 102.1, and the Arbitron people took the diary reports listing our frequency and, since there's no licensed station at 102.1, assigned them to 102.5 in Sarasota, 80 miles south. Their contour's not even designed to reach this market! So 102.5's owner Bud Paxton then proceeded to cut his own balls off by filing a complaint against us for "confusing the listeners!" There was never a technical complaint becasue their engineers drove to our area and could not discern any overlap or interference! Even though 102.5 was one of the most powerful stations in Florida, they could clearly make out both their signal and ours with no overlap, becasue our station was definately professional and correctly operated.
But Bud Paxton persisted with his letters of complaint to the FCC, the attorneys, and every one else who finally brought the guns down on us, about our causing, and this is a direct quote, "Listener Confusion." If they hadn't bitched, their Arbs would have went up five friggin points!! If we were on the air right now, we would be ranking ninth in a 27 station market!!! And they would be getting all the credit for it. THEY'RE FOOLS!!!!
You know what it is? It's a matter of greed!! "I want, I want, I want." We didn't want anything ourselves but just a little small coverage area of OUR college campus, OUR community, and our little radio station did a good job. 24-hours a day live programming, community issues, and damn good music, NOT the same six songs every hour on the hour whether you liked it or not. THAT'S how we got in the Arbs.