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Warrant wrenches radio rebel off the air
Sunday, November 08, 1998 By Rona Kobell, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Radio Carson is dead.
Maybe dead is too harsh a word, but agents from the Federal Communications Commission and U.S. Marshals executed an arrest warrant 10 days ago at Mark Lange's South Side home and took away his transmitter, pulling the plug on his unlicensed radio station.
It's not as though Lange didn't know what was coming. For three years, he's been using a low-grade transmitter to broadcast electronic music -- a mixture of instrumental and synthesized music he says mainstream stations have all but ignored -- on 91.7 FM in Pittsburgh.
First, he broadcast from an apartment and could only reach the Carson Street area, but when he and his wife moved to 2507 Cobden St., which is on a South Side slope, his listeners swelled to 2,000 and included fans in Squirrel Hill, Shadyside and Oakland.
Lange liked the arrangement. Local DJs helped him mix the dance tunes on compact discs, and Lange left his 50-disk CD changer on autopilot while he went to his day job as a technician for a telecommuncations company that he declined to name. At night, he would add commentary to the broadcasts and spin the discs himself.
"It was nothing profane or offensive," Lange said of Radio Carson. "It was just a music format that wasn't available on any Pittsburgh radio station."
It might not have been offensive, but it was illegal, federal agents said.
Lange was broadcasting without a license, a violation of the Communications Act of 1934 and its updated version, the Communications Act of 1996. Under the law, licensed stations must have at least 100 watts of power to broadcast. Powerhouse Pittsburgh stations WWSW and WDVE broadcast at close to 50,000 watts.
The FCC does let some low-power stations operate, but at 10 watts, Radio Carson exceeded the FCC's limit by more than 100 times, according to Harry Litman, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Litman said that unlicensed broadcasting "threatens the integrity of the regulatory structure," and that illegal broadcasts such as Lange's might interfere with licensed broadcasts' public safety messages.
In May, FCC agents visited Lange and warned him to cease broadcasting. Lange said he would, but he refused to put the agreement in writing, Litman said. He continued broadcasting.
"We feel that the Free Radio movement is a challenge to the FCC," Lange said. "Free Radio threatens commercial radio's ability to make money."
Lange invested about $4,000 into his station for equipment and operating expenses. He said that a commercial license would cost him $100,000 to $500,000, and operating costs at the larger stations run into the millions.
Lange has been off the air since the two FCC agents and two U.S marshals visited him on Oct. 28, hauling away about $2,000 of his equipment and warning him that broadcasting would result in a $10,000 fine and an arrest for violating a court order.
Lange is not the only pirate radio broadcaster whose waves have been clipped by federal agents this year. Stephen Dunifer has been fighting the FCC in court since he started Free Radio Berkeley five years ago in California. He succeeded until June, when the FCC won an injunction and shut him down.
Dunifer said the FCC had stacked the deck against the small stations in favor of "the Rupert Murdochs -- those with lots of wealth and lots of clout."
Some small radio stations have the option of filing for nonprofit status to cut down on costs, but Dunifer said that religious organizations that covet the frequencies end up with the best chance of securing the stations.
Dunifer estimated that 500 to 1,000 pirate radio stations are operating in the United States, many of them in Chicago, New York and Miami. In the past two years, the FCC, with the blessing of the National Association of Broadcasters, has cracked down on illegal broadcasts, he said.
But all of the stations recently shut down in Miami are back on the air, despite threats of arrests, Dunifer said. "Shutting a station down is not going to stop this movement. This movement is about free speech. The point is to be an alternative voice in the community."
On the Free Radio Network Web site (www.frn.net), veteran broadcasters such as Dunifer share their struggle with movement newcomers. Dunifer even has a site link to his lawyers, and Lange is thinking about calling them. He hopes to take his case to court for permission to resume his broadcasts.
"If my role is as a martyr, if I give this city a taste of what radio should be and I have to be shut down as a result, then maybe that's what we need to make the system change."
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