Low Power To The People (a chapter on Prometheus from Kinenberg's Fighting for Air)

Low Power To The People

This is a chapter from NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg's fantastic book Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media, featuring the LPFM struggle and the construction of Radio Free Nashville. If you like this chapter, you will love the book which you can buy on our website here.

"The Prometheus Radio Project may have been the lead plaintiff in the media industry’s most important legal dispute, but the collective of West Philadelphia progressives with a do-it-yourself spirit and a prin- cipled belief in noncommercial programming had long operated with- out explicit permission as it challenged Big Media for a piece of the airwaves. Prometheus’s roots were planted a few months after the imple- mentation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, when the group’s founders grew upset enough about the lack of local content and diverse programming in their city’s radio offerings that they went under- ground to start the West Philadelphia Pirate Radio (WPPR) station, 91.3, from a secret location in the economically impoverished but cul- turally rich neighborhood near the University of Pennsylvania campus." (Read the rest in the attached PDF.)