DIALING DOWN TO JESUS

...Another reason for the muted quality of public debate is that fundamentalists stand on the firm ground of freedom of expression...

...The fundamentalist broadcasters operate in an entrepreneurial tradition, using the latest marketing techniques and state-of-the-art technology to promote their self-described conservative philosophy...

...Just as powerful a challenge to local diversity is the growth of satellite-network programming, which some fundamentalist broadcasters would like to bounce off translator stations...

...And while fundamentalists can easily mobilize a massive letter campaign for a single point of view, little tub-thumping is possible for the cooler notion that complex communities require complex mass media...

...The VOICE Network will not normally identify itself as a network or give its originating point...

...But to the seventy-member National Federation of Community Broadcasters, VOICE'S enterprise looks like "spectrum-gobbling"—anchoring down portions of the public spectrum for special interests...

...In the vanguard are conservative fundamentalists, who have filed hundreds of applications for licenses and plan to expand in national satellite programming...

...Dallas-based Criswell Bible Institute also has applications to add to its holdings and runs an evangelical network on shortwave...

...The lyrics must be Biblically sound, the tune must not have a rock beat, and the performance must glorify the Lord...

...The content of religious programming is dangerous territory...

...Now the parties are trying to settle the contest privately, and discussions—with the lawyers' time-clocks running—drag on...

...Who really runs the stations is also in question...

...We've grown 10 per cent in the last year, and I think there's been a parallel growth in the number of religious educational stations...

...Meanwhile, listeners—especially in small markets—may find that dialing down to Jesus is a choice without options...

...There's a nationwide mentality to return to the Christian life...

...Our goal," says VOICE vice president Ronald Johnson, "is to provide quiet instrumental gospel music to Christian families and a comprehensive news service for the Christian community...

...But so far the FCC is inclined to grant the request...

...It's a sword that cuts both ways," he says...

...Franchisers are the hustlers of the religious-radio scene, and they are bumping into each other in the rush of license applications...

...Although the petition was rejected unanimously, the FCC received a million letters protesting the petition...

...They're taking what's just become available and using it...

...But it was already occupied—by an American Heritage Radio affiliate that had repeatedly postponed construction and showed no signs of getting on the air...

...The VOICE Network, for example, is a subsidiary of Accelerated Christian Education, which franchises religious schools...

...That is why, unlike commercial radio, it has no ceiling on multiple ownership of stations—a loophole originally intended to allow statewide educational institutions to make the most of their programming...

...What you are hearing is the sound of educational radio...

...But several AHR affiliates have requested transfers of application to a shadowy outfit called University Broadcasting...

...Most of these religious organizations loathe the first ten amendments to the Constitution, but they also loathe the Bible...

...KUCR protested, providing evidence of its programming for blacks, Hispanics, and Arab-Americans, and of its diverse offerings, including some from Radio Finland...

...dramatic mini-biographies of "great Christians," and advice for home-makers ("Sugar 'n' Spice...

...New licenses are only one way that conservative Christian evangelicals are spreading their message on educational radio...

...Lorenzo Milam, the godfather of community radio, finds the situation ironic...

...They use the latest marketing techniques and state-of-the-art technology to promote their conservative philosophy...

...Both NFCB and National Public Radio have been alarmed enough at the implications of lengthy, murky regulatory proceedings to send out alerts to their members...

...It's back-to-the-future with a vengeance...

...Moody Broadcasting Network, part of the sixty-year-old Moody Bible Institute, is an empire of the religious-radio waves...

...We're way behind in terms of utilizing the resources...

...Tell me," he asks, "are you by any chance a Christian...

...As people who've fought for community expression and dialogue on the airwaves, we're concerned about the use of a public resource for what usually is a .very restrictive point of view," says NFCB's Pat Watkins...

...to write the FCC and support Moody's claim...

...But a great many of the educational stations—about a fifth of them—air religious programming, typically fundamentalist in orientation...

...That way, Moody could originate programming in, say, Boston, and send it on a translator owned by one of their stations to communities as far flung as Ames, Iowa, Ashland, Oregon, and Las Cruces, New Mexico...

...Radio has long been the staple medium of the electronic church...

...Then, in 1985, when the license came up for renewal, KNON's owners found themselves deluged with filings—by Criswell Bible Institute, a VOICE affiliate, and a Family Station, among others...

...When you break in with your donor acknowledgments or announcements about local events, the station will take on a local personality...

...I've seen, ah, one letter opposing it," said the FCC clerk who was at work filing the hundreds of letters asking for Moody programming via translator...

...A directive for the formulating of foreign policy might be expressed this way: Thou shalt do nothing that may cause troubie in the Philippines...

...The charges and countercharges on the franchising of stations and warehousing of valuable spectrum take place largely in the dark confines of the FCC, which stockpiles documents with the care and despair of Bartleby the Scrivener...

...Public funding for public broadcasting has aided many a struggling community station and made possible country-wide program services such as National Public Radio, which allows some 300 highly independent affiliates to pick and choose from its offerings...

...If the local minister offers community programming the way the local McDonald's franchise offers locally made food, then VOICE can be seen as the "real party in interest," to use the lawyers' phrase...

...Yellowstone Public Radio, a supporter of Montana university public radio, has asked the FCC to investigate religious franchisers...

...And don't forget," said an NPR spokesman, "it's a lot harder to get a local station going if there's a signal of any kind occupying the space...

...The National Religious Broadcasters refused to comment on Moody's FCC petition, since the issue divided its members...

...Johnson believes VOICE is filling a widespread need...

...And that's what the Moody Bible Institute has asked the FCC for: permission for what Moody officials call "satel-lators...

...Mainline churches have avoided tangling with fundamentalists on this issue, as on many others...

...For all the coziness, franchisers are bumping into each other in the rush of applications...

...And the odds are good that a local broadcaster or community group will not see the obligatory notice in the newspaper or will not take action in the thirty days allowed to file comments or challenges at the FCC...

...One reason is the power of the fundamentalists to mobilize a large protest from a relatively small group...

...Most, judging from their language, came from subscribers to the Moody Monthly, who followed advice in a front-page article "Moody Bible for All...

...Unlike the franchisers, these multiple owner-producer-distributors have sophisticated offerings...

...In 1983, a community group put it back on the air...

...Casting about for spectrum space for another university station, he found an ideal spot...

...Then he breaks into a more personal tone...

...FCC investigators, at last report, were having trouble pulling together enough data in the right form to find any conclusions on Yellowstone Public Radio's request for investigation of franchisers...

...Universities are quiet on the subject...

...Family Stations and Moody Bible Institute, for instance, have competing applications for a public station in Muskegon, Michigan, and Family and a VOICE affiliate have both made bids for a spectrum spot in Des Moines...

...The temperature is eighty-five degrees, and we ask you to pray for those of our family and friends, including some here at the station, who suffer from allergies in this season...

...The proposal won low marks from secular-broadcast voices, including both the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio, and from some religious ones as well...

...About a tenth of all radio stations in the United States arc devoted in whole or in part to religious broadcasting, much of it avowedly "conservative Christian evangelical...

...But the flow of letters doesn't stop, and the FCC is required to answer them all...

...The educational spectrum is clogged now, NPR pointed out, and translator-fed programming could eat up what remains...

...In the Moody translator case, for instance, the FCC received about a thousand letters from listeners...

...Both VOICE and AHR, whose operations are strikingly similar, were masterminded by James Krames, who for years was a Family Stations employee before going independent...

...The Corporation for Public Broadcasting did not support NPR in its filing against the Moody request, and NPR officials like to refer reporters to their FCC comments rather than speak on the record...

...Mainline churches like the United Church of Christ point out there is no constitutional way to distinguish between one religious perspective and another...

...They're very smart," says Sharon Maeda, head of the Pacifica Foundation...

...Pacifica stations in five major cities exemplify the rowdy clash of views and the wealth of subcultures crowding community airwaves...

...The National Religious Broadcasters, which led the campaign against the original petition, now regularly issues statements debunking the problem...

...It is not only believers like Armstrong who defend fundamentalist access to public airwaves...

...Religious zeal for the educational spectrum has raised plenty of hackles, but remarkably little public debate...

...But success breeds concern...

...Why such discretion...

...VOICE is nervous enough about the localism question to assure prospective clients that it will keep a low profile...

...And lawyer F. Joseph Brinig continues to process filings for the transfers at the FCC, even though he told me he knew nothing about AHR's financial status...

...VOICE applies the same concept to radio, providing an aspiring public-radio licensee, for a few thousand dollars, a turn-key operation: the legal paperwork to file an application with the FCC, the hardware to run the station, 'round-the-clock canned programming— both music and news—and advice on how to raise money from listeners to pay for the franchiser's services...

...Fundamentalists have gone head-to-head, or transmitter-to-transmitter, with each other...

...The Oakland-based Family Systems, which produces programming for its Family Stations Network, also owns ten noncommercial radio stations (some on the educational band), holds construction permits for some twenty more, and has dozens of applications in process...

...AHR also raises the second big issue of religious franchising: warehousing, or squatting on spectrum space without using it...

...Few AHR affiliates have made it to the air, but the pending applications have an impact, as Marvin Granger, general manager of a radio station run by Eastern Montana College, can attest...

...You can't start denying people spectrum space on the basis of their political or religious points of view without ending up with censorship...

...KUCR, a public station owned by the University of California at Riverside, tried last year to upgrade its status and found itself under attack simultaneously from several competitors, including an AHR affiliate and a Family applicant...

...There's something scary about them," he continues...

...At the hearing, Criswell board members proudly entered into the record their own college catalog and hailed the potential of the radio station for furthering their evangelical mission...

...The rush for spectrum is putting pressure on long-established secular educational stations...

...Only local nonprofit organizations can file applications for public radio licenses...

...And no one has forgotten the infamous—and fictional—O'Hair petition...

...Public radio was envisioned as a service of schools and colleges...

...VOICE'S main competitor in the religious franchising business has been American Heritage Radio, whose president, Charles Moore, was a long-time official of the Moral Majority...

...VOICE'S news is little more than headline bulletins culled from the wire services, its "conservative perspective" revealed more by complacent officialism than by hortatory editorializing...

...Some secular educators and broadcasters are beginning to question the right of fundamentalists to purvey, 'round-the-clock and nationwide, a single perspective of American reality on the public spectrum...

...But content is not the major issue with religious-radio franchisers...

...There's a strong pacifist strain, for instance, in the New Testament that's just not reflected in the words of these folks on the air...

...NPR argued to the FCC that the de-facto network of translators would be in a regulatory netherworld—translator licenses are usually granted routinely...

...The public broadcasters have come a long way in the last two decades...

...Anyone can file an application," was as far as a spokesman at the University of California would go, in the wake of the KUCR experience...

...The FCC decided to hold a competitive hearing—an expensive procedure, and an unprecedented one for an educational station...

...in other words, leave Marcos alone...

...Hundreds of AHR affiliates—most of them filing FCC applications that are virtually identical, typically from small towns, and using the name of the town with "Educational Broadcasting Foundation" as their nonprofit handle—have made a bid for public-spectrum space in the last three years...

...Back in 1974, Lorenzo Milam and Jeremy Lans-man asked the FCC to freeze educational radio applications for those offering a single perspective, especially fundamentalists...

...Franchisers appear to have benefited from enterprises begun on more established territory...

...As space on the educational spectrum fills up and new technologies and deregulation create new options, the spectrum looks ever more valuable to entrepreneurs...

...Franchisers are the hustlers of the religious-radio scene, and some of the veterans of fundamentalist broadcasting are stepping up their search for space on the educational spectrum...

...It was Dallas station KNON that rocked the small world of radio regulation...

...Both Family and Moody have translator stations—booster stations that extend a signal over awkward terrain, to communities a few miles further down the road or over the hill...

...Marvin Clapp does engineering work for applications on behalf of both Family and AHR-affiliate stations...

...Of public broadcast organizations, only NFCB is outspoken...

...These low-power, often-unattended stations could become distribution points for national religious network programming, if the FCC allows translators to receive distant signals from microwave or satellite...

...The news will be followed by beautiful, conservative, Christian music...

...And now religious entrepreneurs are aggressively searching out space on the educational band—the slot between eighty-eight and Pat Aufderheide is a senior editor of In These Times and writes frequently for The Progressive on cultural affairs, ninety-two on the FM dial—reserved by the Federal Communications Commission for nonprofit foundations serving "the educational and cultural needs of the entire community...

...We stretched the original definition, and these people are the beneficiaries...

...In fact, the FCC has ruled in the past that "although there may exist a public desire for religious programming in a given community, it cannot be met by a religious organization operating on a reserved channel...

...But the FCC has deliberated slowly over the competing applications and has refused so far to pass judgment—even though a station that can show it serves the local community with diverse perspectives traditionally has been able to rest easy on its license renewals...

...along with eleven stations nationally, it runs a satellite-fed network with 200 outlets nationally and a tape service going out to 540 stations worldwide...

...And lawyer Brinig's name appears at the bottom of applications for Family, AHR, and the new University Broadcasting Foundation licensees...

...The station, originally operated by Milam, went off the air in 1977 after a transmitter was destroyed in a storm...

...Moody's round-the-clock satellite programming, for example, includes kid shows ("Consider the designer of the flying squirrel—his name is Jesus Christ...

...A feisty movement for community-run stations in the 1960s, with flamboyant radio guru Lorenzo Milam as its figurehead, forced the FCC to expand the original definition of public radio...

...The number is now up past sixteen million, and that doesn't count the telephone calls...

...Some of them fear competition and others want to capitalize on new large-scale opportunities...

...The FCC requires that the station be programmed to serve its community of license," it warns...

...Mimeographed scare leaflets surface periodically, claiming that someone like atheist Mad-alyn Murray O'Hair has filed another "anti-God" petition, and the letters flow in again...

...Hundreds of people have been attracted to the offer, and VOICE claims to have seventeen stations now on the air, with twenty-eight pending—though the network is still far from its goal of filing a thousand applications by 1989...

...It's expensive to set up that sort of system, so only a big-timer stands to benefit...

...We went into this because of the demand," Johnson tells me...

...Even the public-interest group People for the American Way, while conducting an investigation, has not launched a media campaign...

...The reason the 'religioids' can get in there and get construction permits [for radio stations] is the same way we got ours...

...Religious stations have an authentic educational purpose and, given the history of the country and the fundamental JudeoChristian values of it, they do serve the public," says Ben Armstrong, head of the 1,200-member association of National Religious Broadcasters...

...But there isn't much recourse, except for filing a challenge that asks the FCC to look at the qualifications of the local group applying for a station...

...They have to—they pay no attention to it...

...The FCC hardly seems eager to address the question of what "educational" really means these days in radio...

...But there are fundamentalists who make a business out of helping them do so...

...Its music is more likely to offend by commission, if the listener finds a steady diet of Sunday-morning easy-listening sound grating...

...In the past year, American Heritage appears to have gone belly-up, although its status is mysterious enough to frustrate researchers at the FCC...

...VOICE'S advertising materials make things clear: "The network programming will begin each hour with national and international news from the conservative perspective...