A public disservice message.

A plan to allow small fry onto the airwaves is thwarted by broadcaster interference.

THEY SAY POLITICS MAKES STRANGE BEDFELLOWS. Apparently, radio waves have a similar effect. At the behest of an awkward alliance between National Public Radio and a powerful commercial broadcasters' lobby, Congress surreptitiously pulled the plug late last year on a Federal Communications Commission initiative that promised to open up the public airwaves to the actual public.

Last year, FCC chairman William Kennard began a process that would have provided broadcast licenses to hundreds of low-cost, low-power FM (LPFM) radio stations. Troubled by the ongoing corporate consolidation of American media, Kennard hoped to broaden the spectrum of political and cultural expression across the radio dial.

Watching the mergers and acquisitions in the media and Internet industries, one would be hard-pressed to disagree with Kennard. LPFM seemed like a modest and simple plan for maintaining at least some access for grassroots political and cultural expression as U.S. airwaves become increasingly dominated by the homogeneous, materialist message of commercial radio.

The LPFM initiative was greeted enthusiastically by church, labor, and community groups seeking new ways to reach their constituents and conduct advocacy and direct service work. More than 1,200 such groups are seeking licenses for an LPFM frequency.

Less happy about LPFM were some stingy frequency holders represented by the National Association of Broadcasters. NAB lobbyists joined forces with the up-to-now predictably politically correct folks at NPR and challenged the FCC plan, claiming that the new LPFM stations would cause interference with their current signals, perhaps even endangering listeners' access to such service-oriented programming as Howard Stern or the Annoying Music Show.

The FCC found no technical merit to the complaint, but these powerful broadcasters haven't achieved their near-complete control of the radio spectrum by giving up that easily. The NAB and NPR junta turned the volume up on their congressional connections in Washington.

Their efforts were rewarded. Hidden away in the 2001 budget is a rider carrying the suitably Orwellian handle "Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act." By attaching the measure to a more important bill, NPR/NAB's congressional henchmen prevented the actual merits of LPFM from even being discussed in Congress. The new law shifts licensing policy-making from the FCC over to frequency-management experts in Congress. The measure will severely curtail LPFM, preventing as much as 75 percent of new licenses from being approved and "preserving" a public resource, the radio spectrum, for the private use of current frequency holders.

Cheryl Leanza of the Media Access Project--a nonprofit public interest law firm that is assisting license seekers--called the action "a highly unusual interference by Congress in a very technical and specific area of FCC decision making." Whatever technical excuse NAB/ NPR spokespeople use to defend their position, Leanza says the real intent of their campaign against LPFM is clear. "They just want to prevent new voices and new competition on the dial."

The LPFM debacle offers an example of the principle of subsidiarity turned precisely inside out, of backroom policymak-ing, and the kind of big government intervention that most members of Congress claim to abhor. The net result is the further deterioration of citizen participation in the nation's civic life.

To paraphrase President Bush the elder: This decision will not stand. Every chipping away of the basic rights of free expression, particularly when it is achieved by political and corporate America working hand in hand, has to be resisted. In the coming months, 255 LPFM stations will begin broadcasting. Those groups that were seeking LPFM licenses should continue to do so while raising as much hell about their right to the nation's public airwaves as they can. The rest of us should let our Congress members know we want our LPFM. In the meantime, a protest campaign has begun to "unpledge" to NPR. The role of public radio in treating public airwaves as private property deserves special condemnation.

This fight is not over. Stay tuned.

KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.