Pirate Radio Station in San Francisco

October 3, 2009 by Katie Bezrouch
Filed under: Culture 
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I believe in responsible media. I spend a good portion of my week fighting for media accountability. I humbly attempt to create factual, amenable media myself, every week. When newspapers and magazines quote white nationalists, I publicly argue that they should be cited that they are white nationalists. When radio stations and news channels give a microphone to bigots who transmit racist propaganda, (that in turn generates violent hate crime) the public should hold those stations accountable. But responsible media doesn’t have to mean bound, or censored communication with the public. In fact, it can be quite the opposite. The amount of genuine alternatives to pre-produced, syndicated corporate radio and TV stations is multiplying rapidly, in the blogosphere and beyond.

One great example is Pirate Cat Radio. It is the most well known currently operating pirate station in the US, and has been operating (from multiple locations since 1998). Currently, they broadcast from a tiny coffee shop in San Francisco, on a cozy corner in the Mission (a neighborhood that is relatively ethnically and economically diverse, with a population that is half Latino, a third White, and 11 percent Asian). Pirate Cat describes itself as “an unlicensed low powered community radio station, broadcasting on 87.9 megahertz, to both the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles basin”.
Monkey is the Pirate Cat Radio chief executive (and that is his legal name, by the way), accepts no advertising, and oversees a staff of 52 disc jockeys who pay a $30 monthly fee to do their air shifts. The San Francisco Chronicle visited the station earlier this year, and reported that “The FCC routinely writes him up for operating without a license. He pulls out the latest citation and field agent’s business card. He submitted his most recent application for a license on one of the same napkins he used to give the guitarist his phone number. “I see these like fix-it tickets,” he said.”

As Monkey shamelessly declares on the station’s website, they operate legally through… well, a loophole. “Thanks to George Bush for declaring the “War Against Terrorism” and U.S. Code of Federal Regulations title 47 section 73.3542, it is now technically legal to operate a radio transmitter with out a formal license.” While this method seems to have worked well for him so far, Paul Riismandel at Radio Survivor points out that maybe, “a better case lies with declaring civil disobedience and pointing to the provision of better public service broadcasting than most other stations in a crowded radio market closed off to low-power FM or any other new community-focused broadcasters.”

When I first arrived at the Coffee shop/Station, I was only planning on staying for an hour or two, to participate on the show “Date Night” with Steph Dub. Five hours later, I found myself completely submerged in the atmosphere, chatting with community members. I talked about sound engineering with the ambitious college-aged barista/radio host, and chatted about immigration law and commerce with a fifty-something Guatemalan store owner from across the street. It is rare to see a neighborhood corner so engaged and interactive with local businesses and with each other. This station is all around, an excellent prototype for real, representative, community media.

Making media in this country (and around the world) more responsible isn’t just about monitoring the big publications. It is equally important to actively contribute to or support high-quality, critically-thinking, creative media outlets. I would like to see more energized, participatory media outlets like Pirate Cat spring up across the nation.

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