FCC shuts down Radio Free Santa Cruz

Radio Free Santa Cruz, a community-supported pirate radio station in Santa Cruz, California, which has been operating without a license for ten years, was raided yesterday (9/29/04) by armed federal agents (15 U.S. marshals and five FCC agents), who shut it down and confiscated all its equipment. This was after the Santa Cruz City Council had passed two resolutions in support of the station. You can read more here – http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/30/1411235 – and here http://www.freakradio.org/about.html.

This comes just two weeks after the FCC raided and shut down three-year-old KFAR (First Amendment Radio) in Knoxville, Tennessee. See http://www.mediageek.org/archives/002357.html and http://www.kfar.org/.

While neither station was licensed, neither station was interfering with the signals of any licensed station, nor violating FCC regs in any other respect.

Both stations have a left-of-center political orientation and broadcast such programs as Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!

Legally, the FCC had the authority to shut down these stations. But I can’t help but wonder: Why? And why now, when both stations have operating for years without doing injury to anyone?

I’m amazed that they were allowed to stay on the air as long as they did.

If you run a pirate radio station, the FCC will shut you down. It may take a while. The FCC is severely understaffed in the monitoring and enforcement departments. They often rely on public complaints to determine where to target their limited resources. Violations that affect public safety are given top priority. For other violations, it can take years for them to take action, even when they are provided with extensive documentation. That said, if you stay on the air long enough, they will shut you down, confiscate your equipment, impose fines, etc. Nobody get a free pass.

Yeah, especially nobody Democratic when Repubs are in power. We’ll remember this when we get back in power. We’re gonna remember a LOT of things.

Would it have been all right if they were right of center? Or if they hadn’t had city council resolutions supporting them?

I don’t know what your beef is. If you have all of the necessary radio gear, it isn’t all that hard to get a license.

Why didn’t they jump through the necessary hoops when that dangerous right winger Bill Clinton was in power?

For someone with a tremendous faith in the ability of the government to do good, you sure do question the motives of actual people in government a lot. Better be careful-- you might turn into a libertarian some day! :slight_smile:

Good question. And neither of the stories covering this answer it. How hard is it, really, for a radio station to get a license? I’ll start a thread in GQ and let you know what I find out.

OK, I’ve started a GQ thread: “Why don’t pirate radio stations just get licensed? How hard is it?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=278540. We shall see what we shall see.

Does it really make any difference how hard it is to get a radio license? It’s hard to get a doctor’s license to practice, but that doesn’t mean it’s alright for unlicensed doctor’s to open up patients…

A law’s a law. They broke it, they got shut down. The fact that they were breaking the law, unpunished, for an extended period of time shouldn’t change the consequences. Maybe the FCC decided to start cracking down in this regard (they have been fairly anal since the whole ‘wardrobe malfunction’). Maybe people decided to start complaining. Who knows?

Of course it makes a difference! If the requirements for getting a radio station license are arguable unreasonable, or biased against startup operations and community stations, that is a very important fact to take notice of and, maybe, something we should agitate to change. If an insufficiently skilled doctor gets a license, people could die as a result. If a radio station gets a license without having all its ducks in a row (or, for that matter, operates unlicensed without interfering with any other station’s signal), where’s the harm?

I sure don’t know, but I’m hoping to find out. I think it’s very important to find out. Which is one reason I started this thread, and the GQ thread.

OK, I’ll play. Lets assume this isn’t just another case of the FCC shutting down an illegal transmission site because, well it is part of their job and lets assume this is a case of jackbooted partisans misusing their authority to stamp out dissention. I assume we can agree that if politics are the sole motivation for this raid then it is wrong but you seem to intimate that if payback is a factor, then whoever it is has it coming. In the mid 90’s I’d occasionally listen to this right wing Christian nutjob named “Brother Stair” on short-wave. When he wasn’t spouting “end times prophecies" about nuclear damnation and pointing out such pearls on insight such as Reno (as in Janet) being spelled with the same letters as Nero, he’d occasionally bellyache about the FCC confiscating a ship he was equipping to sail international waters to broadcast his “message of truth”.

Hypothetically speaking if the raid against the good people of Radio Free Santa Cruz was motivated not by honest law enforcement but rather by someone who remembered how past administrations “wielded their might” to “silence their critics” and wished to “even the score” would it make it more justified? If not exactly what would you suggest they do next time the Dems are in power and you all remembered?

I guess the way to determine if there’s selective enforcement is to see if there are right-wing pirate stations that have been around as long or longer without being shut down.

Good as reason as any to shut it down, IMHO.

I live pretty close to Santa Cruz, and I can vouch for that statement! :slight_smile:

I’ve heard the station before – very weak signal, and it seemed to play mostly original music. I thought it was a lot better than many of the legal radio stations, but limited because of its signal strength. I have no idea why they didn’t have a license but they were operating out of a single bedroom style thing, it seemed very low budget, co-op style system. And Santa Cruz is currently going Clear Channel, so that might have to do with why now… Since '96 the local stations have been slowly bought out and done the same thing as was mentioned in Austin. The Monterey station for example currently is the only 'alternative(music)" station in the area right now and broadcasts up to north of Santa Cruz and south and east of Salinas, a very wide area. Radio Free Santa Cruz covered(up to last April or so I can vouch) from the San Lorenzo river to a little past Mission St, and from about Costco to the beach, depending on your relative location/altitude/whatever affects radio waves near you.

I’ve started trying to do some research with regard to just this, but it’s hard to know what terms to use to get that specific information. I did find this from the FCC (2002).

Near the end of the page, under Spectrum Enforcement:

This is linked from the previous link, and outlines the regulations violated, as well as provides a loooooong list of pirate radio stations they’ve shut down, going back to Feb. 2000. Hope that helps…someone.

For those of us unfamiliar with the area, how large is this? As in “the station was receivable up to X kilometers from the transmitter”.

You are implying that the FCC is doing ClearChannel’s bidding. Do we have any solid reason to believe this?

I’'ve never even heard of a right-wing pirate radio station. Has anybody?

Here are some selected posts from the GQ thread I started on this topic (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=278540: