The fallout continues from Charles McGrath's essay "Is PBS Still Necessary?", published in the New York Times on February 17th. Public television's Newshour has, understandably, paid close attention to the piece, inviting its fans to post response comments on its Web site. Here's one I'll bet the PBS suits especially like:

I find the comment of the New York Times writer [McGrath] , "Jim Lehrer, 73, has been with “NewsHour” since 1975, so long that some of his early viewers are now in assisted living," to be both condescending, and a cynical attempt to lead readers to a discriminatory judgment. This article (Is PBS Still Necessary?) is contemptible and beneath the 'dignity' of the New York Times. The News Hour with Jim Lehrer is the best news program on television.

To be fair to the poster's feelings, McGrath no doubt intended to be provocative when writing the essay, eg. his left-handed dismissal of accusations of left-wing bias:

"Scanning the PBS lineup, in fact, it’s hard to detect much of a bias toward anything at all, except possibly mustiness. Except for 'Antiques Roadshow,' all the prime-time stalwarts — 'The NewsHour,' 'Nova,' 'Nature,' 'Masterpiece' — are into their third or fourth decade, and they look it. . . . Since corporate sponsors were allowed to extend their 'credit' announcements to 30 seconds, commercials in all but name have been a regular feature on public television, and that’s not to mention pledge programs, the fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding."

McGrath says he likes public radio better, arguing that "by not trolling after ratings, it has managed to stay distinctive: it does what nothing else on radio does and sticks to its core: news and public affairs and the oddball weekly show like 'Car Talk' and 'A Prairie Home Companion'." But it should be noted that, like public television, public radio broadcasts spots that are, for all practical purposes, commercials. They just have to stay within certain bounds

Section 399B(b)(2) of the Communications Act makes the bounds policy clear: "No public broadcast station may make its facilities available to any person for the broadcasting of any advertisement." The statute defines "advertisement" as a message or program that is broadcast in exchange for remuneration and that promotes

• "any service, facility, or product offered by any person who is engaged in such offering for profit"
• or advocates the views of a given person on some matter of public interest
• or takes a stand on a candidate for public office

The FCC enforces these rules, sometimes. Here are two relatively recent cases:

In 2004 the hammer came down on Christian non-commercial station WCVZ(FM) in South Zanesville, Ohio. A year earlier the station received remuneration to run announcements on behalf of a station underwriter. The underwriter, Barnes Advertising, promoted the station on local billboards in exchange for the on-air notices.

The Commission took particular exception to the spots because they tried to distinguish the advertised service from the competition "by directly stating or implying that they offer superior service or products." The announcements also urged listeners to patronize the business, a major naughty to the FCC.

Plus the agency estimated that WCVZ ran the spots over 3,000 times over a 15 month period, "indicating an utter failure of licensee practice and policy concerning its underwriting compliance responsibilities," the FCC's December 6, 2004 Notice of Apparent Liability concluded.

The Commission fined WCVZ $20,000 for the violations.

More recently, a party complained about illegal advertising on low power non-profit FM station KFLO in Jonesboro, Arkansas. KFLO had filed for an FCC construction permit, and the complainant asked that the permit be blocked.

The FCC reviewed the complaint and found valid some of the concerns. Announcements on behalf of three companies — S&T, C.J. Watkins Construction, and EchoQuest — included references that encouraged business patronage, referred to prices, and portrayed the underwriter "in a comparative and qualitative manner." To wit:

"The C.J. Watkins Construction Company announcement impermissibly induces patronage of the underwriter's business by advertising that 'all completed work comes with a full warranty.' Finally, the Echoquest announcement extols the 'The Fresh Air' as an 'advanced air system' which utilizes 'state-of-the-art technology to create a more efficient way to keep you free of smoke and odor'."

But the FCC's November 2005 decision on the matter commended KFLO management for quickly rectifying the problem by removing the offending ads and taking further steps to ensure future compliance. The Commission let the station off with an admonishment, and authorized the construction permit to go ahead.

In addition, the FCC noted that most of KFLO's underwriting spots stayed within acceptable limits. "Specifically, the announcements briefly describe their underwriters' products or services in generic, value-neutral terms, and list business addresses and telephone numbers, consistent with the identification-only purpose of underwriting announcements," the Commission wrote.

When did these sort of non-commercial commercials become acceptable? Quite a while ago, actually. In March of 1984 the FCC relaxed its non-commercial policies regarding public radio stations to "enhance the scope of donor and underwriting acknowledgements," as the agency put it. Stations could now include on-air thank yous that include:

• slogans and logos that "identify and do not promote"
• the location of the underwriter
• "value neutral" descriptions of products and services
• brands and product services and trade names

It appears that, for the FCC, the three big violations of Section 399B are announcements that include pricing information (eg, "Just 49.99! Buy now!"), calls to action ("Come on down and take a test drive!"), and special inducements to buy ("Subprime loans available for a limited time only!").

On their advisory page, the FCC lists the following underwriting notice as objectionable:

"Production [of the program] has been made possible by grants from: A&J Luxury Limo Service. For a fabulous night on the town, spoil yourself or a client with a relaxing and comfortable evening in one of A&J's luxurious limousines featuring a retractable moon roof, color television, stereo, cellular telephone, intercom and wet bar. For the perfect way to enjoy a perfect and safe evening, call us at 360-8444."

This acknowledgement clearly violates the "call to action" prohibition and probably goes over the line on the "inducement" no-no. But I'll bet that a program director wouldn't get into any trouble if they just shortened the blurb to "Production [of the program] has been made possible by grants from: A&J Luxury Service, bringing posh transportation to the Anytown community since 1977 . . . "

So don't blame 'enhanced underwriting,' as it is called, for public television's lack of success, if far more popular public radio runs them too thanks to lenient government policies. But feel free to blame these FCC approved advertisements, as do I, for blurring the distinction between public and commercial media, making public broadcasting ever more vulnerable to charges of irrelevance.

I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh again these days. Limbaugh has been assuring his listeners that he is still not on the John McCain for President bandwagon just because he protested the New York Times' article on the Arizona Senator's relationship with a lobbyist. McCain's various collaborations with liberals are still unforgivable, Limbaugh insists.

"This is what you get when you walk across the aisle and try to make these people your friends," he explained. "Why should any of us be surprised or even angry at what the New York Times is doing here trying to take out John McCain?"

The nerve of the Times. After all, taking out McCain is Rush Limbaugh's job. Yesterday the talk show host outlined in painful detail McCain's troubles with the Federal Election Commission over a snafu that will either lock him into legal spending limits through July, or expose him as soliciting a loan without offering any public election money as collateral.

Is it only a matter of time before Limbaugh returns to falsely accusing McCain of having admitted that torture worked on the Senator during his five year ordeal in Vietnam? Or gleefully predicting that if Mike Huckabee wins any more victories, McCain will go "psycho?" . . . reduced to sitting "in a rocking chair wearing his mother's wig sitting above the Bates Hotel!" ?

Say, shouldn't the Republican contender be allowed to respond to all this at its source? Could it be that McCain needs the Fairness Doctrine?

Yes, I know this is heresy. Nobody supports the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine any more. Certainly not conservatives, and rarely even liberals.

After all, Reasonable People know that during its tyrannical reign from 1949 through 1987, the Fairness Doctrine did terrible things. It required a Christian radio station to give a journalist rebuttal time after falsely calling him a Communist. The policy required television stations that broadcast cigarette advertisements to also run commentaries warning viewers that cigarettes, when used as instructed, could kill them. It allowed community leaders to challenge the license of a Mississippi TV station whose general manager blocked news stories even remotely sympathetic to integration, and in 1962 went on the air to denounce James Meredith, urging the governor to "keep that nigra out of Old Miss."

If these atrocities were not enough, broadcasters complain that the Fairness Doctrine cost them money. Back in the Dark Days, it either cost them money to put competing viewpoints on the air, or it cost them money to appeal a Fairness Doctrine complaint to the FCC. Apparently when these broadcasters purchased their radio or TV licenses, promising to serve the "interest, convenience, and necessity" of the public as per the Communications Act, they did not think that said pledge would cost them any money. It's good to know that innocence still prevails somewhere. To further protect these veritable babes in the woods, Ronald Reagan's FCC Chair Mark Fowler pledged to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and it has been dead ever since, Thank God.

And so it is only unreasonable bloggers like myself who support the restoration of the Fairness Doctrine. It's just political perverts like me who think that when Rush Limbaugh—the Limbaugh who half-jokingly calls himself "Kingmaker of the Republican Party"—tells his listeners that McCain's nomination "will destroy the Republican Party," McCain should have a chance to respond on stations that broadcast said prediction.

But paradoxically, there's a man in the United States Senate who can be counted on to block my agenda dead in its tracks: John McCain.

Last June, not moments after the Republican Far Right triumphed over McCain's hated immigration reform law, former talk show host now Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, introduced a rider to a budgetary bill in the House that would forbid funding for the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the Fairness Doctrine. It overwhelmingly passed the House on Thursday June 26th. Even lots of Democrats voted for it.

Why then? Oklahoma Republican Senator and noted global warming denialist James Inhofe charged that he overheard California Senator Barbara Boxer and New York's Hillary Clinton plotting something against talk radio in a Capitol Hill elevator. Various statements sympathetic to the Fairness Doctrine made by John Kerry and Diane Feinstein were paraded out for all to see and dread.

But this was not enough, Reasonable People cried, including Rush Limbaugh, who calls the Fairness Doctrine the "hush Rush" rule. And so John McCain, desperate to get his Far Right creds back in order, threw his support behind the "Broadcaster Freedom Act." The proposed bill would go beyond Pence's largely symbolic one year budget rider. It would just by plain old Act of Congress prevent the FCC from enforcing the concept, once and for all.

How is it doing in the Senate eight months later? Well, the law has been introduced and cosponsored by 33 senators. But that's it; the bill hasn't even been scheduled for debate. And that makes sense, because its purpose was never to actually be enacted so much as to make the Ditto Heads happy. "I know most of my fellow conservative bloggers hate McCain," wrote one blogger at the time, "but anyone with 22 pets and who's against the 'Fairness Doctrine' can't be all that bad."

And so, thanks in large part to Senator John McCain of Arizona, radio is safe, safe from the obligation to let McCain respond over the Limbaugh network to Limbaugh's assertion that McCain "lied about his reason for opposing the Bush tax cuts." Limbaugh can continue saying anything he wants about McCain, me, or you, for that matter, without contradiction, save what we say on our blogs. And isn't that what a level playing field is all about.

Hey U.S. voter: if you live and voted in one of the Super Tuesday states, you made your decision and now it is done. You'll be bragging about, puzzling over, or regretting your choice for the rest of your life. But if you reside and exercise the franchise in Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, or Guam, among other geopolitical entities, then you've still got some obsessing to do.

You're probably pondering questions like The War, health care, the economy, will Bill behave, does Obama have substance, and other matters of varying degrees of actual relevance. But here's an idea: why not vote for one of these folks on the basis of their record on media regulation issues? Yes! The Federal Communications Commission! Net neutrality! Media ownership! Indecency regulation!

Ok. I know that you're not going to make your decision based on some single issue policy wonk's blog. Understood. But wouldn't you like to at least know where these jerks stand on various telecom and broadcasting issues?

Lucky for you, I've put together a whole chart about this stuff. But some people prefer their information in prose rather than tabular form, so here goes:

Democrats

Alas, of all of the contenders for the Democratic nomination, John Edwards had the most clear and comprehensive set of positions on Federal Communications Commission related matters. Unfortunately, the former United States Senator has withdrawn from the race. But let's give credit where due.

Candidate Edwards repeatedly pledged to strengthen rather than weaken the FCC's media ownership rules—limits on how many newspapers, TV and radio stations one entity (think Rupert Murdoch) can own in one city.

"Edwards believes extreme media consolidation threatens free speech," his very thorough media page declared, "tilts the public dialogue towards corporate priorities and away from local concerns, and makes it increasingly difficult for women and minorities to own a stake in our media."

Edwards also promised to strengthen public interest requirements for broadcasters, including disability access requirements. Edwards said that he supports net neutrality, ensuring that ISPs don't become the gatekeepers of the Internet. And he assured voters that he would lift restrictions on the licensing of Low Power FM radio stations.

Congressmember Dennis Kucinich, who has also withdrawn from the race, also supported net neutrality and opposed the relaxation of the agency's media ownership rules. Kucinich has been a strong supporter of locally controlled, public access television and Low Power FM radio.

But these guys are history, as we a-historical Americans love to say. Anyway, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have clear records as well.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama's Web site does not include a media page. But Obama did very publicly warn FCC Chair Kevin Martin not to rush through the media ownership rule changes that, in the end, Martin rushed through. All in all, I've been impressed with the extent to which Obama has been on-point on this issue, especially as it affects his home state of Illinois.

As for net neutrality, Obama says he's for it. He writes on his official Senate site:

" . . . the big telephone and cable companies want to change the internet as we know it. They say they want to create high-speed lanes on the internet and strike exclusive contractual arrangements with internet content-providers for access to those high-speed lanes. Those of us who can't pony up the cash for these high-speed connections will be relegated to the slow lanes.

Allowing the Bells and cable companies to act as gatekeepers with control over internet access would make the internet like cable. A producer-driven market with barriers to entry for web site creators and preferential treatment for specific sites based not on merit, the number of hits, but on relationships with the corporate gatekeeper. . . . So here's my view. We can't have a situation in which the corporate duopoly dictates the future of the internet and that's why I'm supporting what is called net neutrality."

Then there are indecency issues, which high profile Democrats tend to avoid. While Obama did not co-sponsor the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which greatly boosted fines for obscenity scofflaws, he did not oppose the bill either, which passed the Senate unanimously. If you belong to the Parents Television Council, you think that's great. If you belong to the American Civil Liberties Union, you think it sucks. You're call.

Hillary Clinton has been less vocal on some of these issues than Obama. But she's been supportive of important causes in the Senate. She did support a Senate bill that would require the FCC to slow down on enacting new media ownership rules. She has also supported net neutrality. For example, Clinton co-sponsored the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, along with Obama and former presidential candidate Christopher Dodd.

Clinton has come in for some criticism for her support for a non-profit called "Connect America," which Public Knowledge advocate Art Brodsky says has exaggerated its success in bringing broadband to under served communities. Like Obama, she did not co-sponsor the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, but she did not oppose the bill either.

Republicans

Republicans Arizona United States Senator and likely Republican nominee John McCain supports media consolidation. He had a chance to oppose it in 2003, after former FCC Chair Michael Powell dramatically relaxed the agency's media ownership rules. In response, the Senate passed a statement of disapproval of the FCC's actions, declaring that the move would have "no force or effect." McCain voted against the resolution, as did most Republicans. I find this vote on McCain's part puzzling, since he was the only Republican in the Senate to vote against the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which launched all this unfortunate media ownership rule revising in the first place.

McCain does, however, support efforts to make it easier to start a Low Power FM radio station. He has also advocated "a la carte" cable reform, which some groups say will facilitate your picking and choosing which cable channels you want to buy, and others say will just ratchet up the price of cable generally, and make it harder for independent channels to survive. Again, your call on this one.

Oddly, Senator Straight Talk Express very strongly opposes the restoration of the Fairness Doctrine. That's the idea that if somebody on some radio station says you are a dirty Communist/Islamofascist/whatever, you have the right to appear on that radio station and respond (unless you feel that you are a dirty Communist/Islamofascist/whatever). This policy, which the FCC abandoned in 1987, would, ironically, give McCain the right to appear on and respond to radio stations that broadcast Rush Limbaugh's false assertion that McCain once claimed that torture worked on him while he languished in a North Vietnamese prison.

In June of last year McCain announced that he would submit the "Broadcaster Freedom Act" to the Senate. "The legislation would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from reinstating the 'Fairness Doctrine'," his press release stated, "a regulation that had required broadcasters to present opposing viewpoints on issues of public importance." Go figure.

As for the rest of the surviving Republicans, it is hard to tell what Mike Huckabee thinks. As a former state governor, it's difficult to track his positions on national broadcasting and telecommunications issues. Huckabee says he's against indecency on radio and television; no surprise there. One blogger thinks Huckabee supports net neutrality.

Then there's the politically unclassifiable Ron Paul (yes, he's still running). The Texas Congressmember opposes net neutrality, but that's probably because he opposes practically all government regulation except anti-abortion laws. He also opposes the Patriot Act and has condemned those parts of the Act that have been used to justify the electronic surveillance of Americans. Paul also opposes the Fairness Doctrine and opposes extending indecency laws to cable.

Basically, you name it, Ron Paul's against it, which may be good or bad, depending on your perspective.

BTW: Contrary to what you may think, Hillary Clinton has no public position on the Fairness Doctrine. This, however, has not stopped a veritable battalion of right-wing talk radio hosts from predicting that she secretly supports the policy and will gleefully sneak it on us once she's elected President.

Of all the Democrats, only former candidate Dennis Kucinich says that he supports the restoration of the provision.That, of course, would be Truly Horrible, possibly even worse than making sure that more children have health insurance.

Anyway, good luck out there in Texas and Ohio. Hope this helped. We'll all be watching you on our government regulated TV sets.

Do you think that the typical Internet sex offender lies about his age, pretends to be another child, then abducts his victim after tricking the boy or girl into a secret tryst?

That isn't the way it happens, a new report coming from the University of New Hampshire concludes. "Online Predators and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment" calls "largely inaccurate" the public perception of the problem.

"Internet sex crimes involving adults and juveniles more often fit a model of statutory rape—adult offenders who meet, develop relationships with, and openly seduce underage teenagers—than a model of forcible sexual assault or pedophilic child molesting," the report warns.

The authors of the study—Janis Wolak, David Finkelhor, Kimberly J. Mitchell, and Michele L. Ybarra—do research at the University of New Hampshire's Internet Solutions for Kids, Inc. The American Psychologist just published their survey. But Finkelhor began disclosing the groups' findings in the summer of last year. In July, Finkelhor testified before the United States Senate Commerce Committee. He said that, after studying hundreds of cases, his research team found "a different reality" than what most people probably think about the problem.

Here's some of what Finkelhor told the Committee.

• Teenagers, not young children, are the typical online sex crime victims. And the "predominant crime scenario" rarely involves violence or abduction. These take place, respectively, in only five and three percent of cases.
• The overwhelming majority of adult offenders do not conceal who they really are. 80% are "quite explicit about their sexual intentions towards these kids."
• Violent sex crimes are atypical in these cases. By the time the adult and the teenager have met, the former has typically engaged in weeks of "very often quite explicit online conversations that play on the teen's desire for romance, adventure, sexual information and understanding."
• Most of these teenagers are "troubled youth with histories of family turmoil and physical and sexual abuse." In 73% of the cases studied, the teenager went to meet with the adult offender more than once.
• And: "Half the victims were described by police as being in love with or feeling close friendship with the offender," Finkelhor told the committee. In 25% of the cases, "the teenager ran away from home to be with the offender."

Finkelhor said that, given this research, educators and authorities need to rethink what puts kids at risk on the Internet. The big risk factors do not include having a blog, a MySpace account, or giving out personal information.

"What puts kids in danger for these crimes is being willing to talk about sex online with strangers, and having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web-" Finkelhor argued, such as "going to sex sites and chat rooms, and interacting with lots of people there."

"To prevent these crimes, we have to take on more awkward and complicated topics and start with an acceptance of the fact that some teens are curious about sex and looking for romance and adventure," he concluded. "So we need to educate them - about why hooking up with a 32 year old has major drawbacks like jail, bad press, public embarrassment; and why they should be discouraging, not patronizing, sites and people who are doing offensive things online, fascinating as they may seem."

But Finkelhor and his teams' new report warns that this task may be a challenge. As use of handheld broadband devices like cell phones and personal organizers continues to expand, "youth Internet use could become harder to monitor, and accurate descriptions of and education about risks to youths will become even more important," the study concludes.

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the proposed merger of Sirius and XM radio. Yes, it may be hard to believe, but on a bright, sunny February 19th, 2007, the two satellite audio services announced their plans to marry, and asked the United States Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission to give their blessing.

They've been standing at the altar ever since.

Over the last year, everybody and his sister has weighed in on this matter. On one hand, a seemingly endless array of civil rights and identity groups have endorsed the merger. On the other hand, a strange bedfellows coalition of media reform groups and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) have opposed it, arguing that the union would enjoy a monopoly over the satellite radio spectrum.

Indeed, the merger XM/Sirius would become a monopoly, but the NAB coming out against media consolidation? Good grief. . . .

For a wide variety of widely speculated reasons, neither the FCC or the Justice Department have been able to resolve this question. Why? The way I see it, merger proposals are dangerous moments for the masters of our telecommunications sector. When two or three media moguls go hat in hand to the Federal Communications Commission, asking for permission to unite, they unleash a public comment cycle on the question. That always releases the reformers and dreamers, who ask uncomfortable questions and come up with alternative scenarios for the future.

Sometimes the reformers even get their way. AT&T had to pledge to honor net neutrality rules for at least a couple of years to get their merger with BellSouth past the FCC in late December.

Now that XM and Sirius satellite radio want permission to mate, the reformers have returned. The good folks at Public Knowledge filed comments with the FCC on the union shortly after its proposal. They want conditions for merger to include a requirement that the new entity reserve five percent of its resources for "non-commercial educational and informational programming over which it has no editorial control."

It's a very reasonable suggestion, but I'm going to play dreamer this time. I say let XM and Sirius sink or swim separately. If the two services sink, turn all of satellite radio into a listener supported, non-profit service.

XM and Sirius say they need to merge because they've still got a long climb to get to a sustainable plateau. Lots of smart people doubt that they will ever get there. When they first proposed to unite, Business Week offered a bleak prognosis under any circumstances, noting that neither firm had yet to earn "a penny of profit."

"Whether or not Washington lets XM Satellite Radio Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio merge seems beside the point," a column on the proposal began. "Even if they get the nod, there's no guarantee the six-year-old business model will survive."

The problem is that when the FCC launched its satellite Digital Audio Radio Service in 1997 (SDARS), it did not allow for the technology to go through what I call its natural non-profit period.

"The American consumer can now look forward to an exciting new radio service," the FCC's October 1997 press release on SDAR's promised, forgetting that when telecommunications technologies first surface, their founders often do not know how to make money from them.

That was early radio's story. As the historian Susan Smulyan notes in her terrific book Selling Radio, so uncertain were early broadcasters about how to monetize their industry, that in 1925 one radio magazine actually held a contest for the best essay on how to make radio profitable.

This dilemma goes all the way back to the early days of telegraph, when its investor deprived inventor Samuel Morse pleaded unsuccessfully with Congress to take over the technology. And it appeared more recently with the Internet, which functioned as a tool of universities and the Defense Department long before it morphed into America On Line. New telecommunications technologies sometimes have to find their sea legs in a non-market based environment before they can become monetized, as the IPO smoothies like to say.

Somehow the framers of our satellite radio service thought that they could skip this natural non-profit phase. In retrospect, their decision seems naive. FM radio struggled for decades with the same obstacles that satellite faces today: a potential audience that needed new receivers to access the service, and a new juggernaut competitor, television, that sucked away listeners and turned them into viewers.

Satellite's competing juggernaut is not TV, but the Internet, which links to a veritable smorgasbord of terrestrial stations that I can access via my wireless laptop and a pair of good speakers. And in the battle for freeway commuters, satellite still has to trounce terrestrial radio, which, remarkably, continues to hold its own despite a drop in listeners and an overall decline in quality.

So it seems unlikely that this version of satellite radio will make it, merged or unmerged. But there is another system for developing the service that better fits the bill: listener supported non-commercial radio (which for convenience's sake I will acronym LS-NCR).

Most U.S. radio listeners have become so accustomed to commercial broadcasting that they regard LS-NCR as a sort of weird, alien protocol. But, in fact, it's as American as apple pie. We invented it on the west coast of the United States after the Second World War. KPFA-FM, launched in Berkeley, California, in 1949, remains the world's longest running listener supported radio station. KPFK-FM in Los Angeles followed ten years later.

LS-NCR helped FM grow. Like XM and Sirius, KPFA founder Lew Hill sold receivers to subscribers so that they could listen to his station. A decade later a wave of "free form" radio stations, many of them strong on listeners and lighter on profits, built an even more passionate audience for FM.

In a very real sense, XM and Sirius are listener supported institutions, but they thought that they could build a loyal subscription paying audience from the top down, with auto manufacturers and cable companies as their partners, rather than from the bottom up, with the listeners. They were wrong.

I was talking about this with my friend Bonnie Simmons, who ran San Francisco's free form station KSAN for ten years. Bonnie pointed out that XM and Sirius recruited many of their deejays from terrestrial radio. Most of them had strong local or regional followings, but have not duplicated that loyalty on a national level. Bob Edwards and Howard Stern have come to satellite with a built-in national cache, but they are not typical of the genre.

And let's face it, a lot of XM/Sirius isn't even really radio. It's juke box; deejayless streams of music that you can put together just as nicely with your own iPod.

Skeptics of my proposal will point to the historic under performance of listener supported radio. And they're right to be skeptical. Most radio stations that depend primarily on subscriptions have relatively small audiences. There are two reasons for this shortfall.

First, the FCC has allocated only a tiny number of frequencies for listener supported radio stations. This has always forced them to cater to too many different audiences. As a result, "community" radio stations, which run primarily on the listener supported model, often become balkanized exercises in cultural power sharing; difficult for the average radio consumer to listen to on a regular basis.

Second, while the listener supported model sustains a radio station, it rarely capitalizes it. LS-NCR on its own usually keeps the frequency loping along on a maintenance level, but doesn't provide the money for professional talent and on-going development.

Giving our digital satellite audio service over to a wide field of listener-supported non-profits would address the first problem. A critical mass of LS-NCRs would allow them to diversify: to create sports LS-NCRs, and all-news LS-NCRs, and music format LS-NCRs - from hip-hop to classical, rather than forcing all these tendencies to cram themselves together into a few stations on the bottom of the FM dial. To the extent that terrestrial LS-NCR's have been able to specialize, they have become much more effective stations.

Second, the FCC, or Congress, should create a matching fund to support digital satellite LS-NCRs. Once the station reaches a threshold of subscribers, the matching fund kicks in with additional money.

And rather than coming from the highly politicized Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the fund should flow from spectrum auction sales or satellite leasing income. I would even look at the FCC's ever evolving Universal Service Fund as a source.

But even if a steady font of income isn't immediately identified, converting satellite radio to a listener-supported service will get the ball rolling. Because when all else fails, LS-NCRs run on fanatic power, led by "the little man with a large view," as FCC consultant and FM booster Charles Siepmann wrote 50 years ago in his book on FM, Radio's Second Chance.

And in the end, isn't it always the fanatics who pioneer the future?

So here is what I suggest that the FCC do. Let XM and Sirius run their course. Then open up SDARs in a manner similar to the FCC's application window for Non-Commercial Educational radio.

Launch an application period for as many digital satellite LS-NCRs as possible. Plug in the usual criterion: only non-profit organizations with accountable boards may apply. They've got to prove that they can run the station without income for at least three months.

But add one more requisite to the equation. Partition the matrix of licenses into about a dozen generally recognized formats: news, talk, various cultural forms, from hip-hop to a BBC Third Programme style format, even sports.

Make the applicants pick a format. Don't let the germinators of this new service fall into the old trap of trying to please everybody who hovers on the margins of our present commercial system of broadcasting.

Trust me. This will work. Ten years from now digital satellite radio will be crammed with passionate, loyal, paying listeners.

Then corporate America will have something viable to ruin.