Micah Loewinger: Hey, it's Micah. If you've been enjoying The Divided Dial series as much as we have, come join us in New York on June 11th for a very cool, very low-key live show that I'll be doing with Katie Thornton. We'll hear about the crazy lengths Katie went to to bring these stories to life and we'll talk about what our role is in keeping the public airwaves public. The event is on June 11th in New York. You can find more information at wnyc.org/events and in the show notes for today's podcast. Come and nerd out with us on all things radio. It's going to be really fun.

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Before the Federal Communications Commission approved a $20 billion acquisition by Verizon, it had an eye-popping requirement.

?Speaker: The merger was approved in part because Verizon promised to end its DEI program.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. The FCC's lone Democratic commissioner is speaking out.

Anna Gomez: It's not our agency's function to prosecute diversity, equity, and inclusion. What alarms me about it is that capitulation breeds capitulation.

Micah Loewinger: Also on this week's show, the final installment of The Divided Dial, the pirates versus the profiteers.

Bennett Cobb: As the other radio frequencies get more and more jammed up with things like Wi-Fi and satellites, where is the available real estate? Well, it's in the shortwave. Who would have thought that shortwave is now fabulously valuable to Wall Street?

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Micah Loewinger. On Tuesday, this happened.

?Speaker: NPR and three Colorado public radio stations today filed suit against the Trump administration in federal court.

?Speaker: Trump has accused NPR and PBS of bias, signing an executive order for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop funding them.

?Speaker: White House officials said both organizations had received "tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread radical woke propaganda disguised as news."

Micah Loewinger: NPR's lawyers argue that the president's actions are retaliatory and, as such, are a clear violation of the First Amendment. Right now, the constitutional right to report without government interference is under assault all over the place.

Recently, I spoke to Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, the independent federal agency that regulates much of the US Media. She's been on something of a media tour, speaking out about what she sees as the weaponization of her agency.

Anna Gomez: What I am witnessing includes investigating broadcasters for editorial decisions in their newsrooms, threatening tech companies that respond to their customers' desire for fact-checking, investigating regulatees for their fair hiring practices. The administration tried to shutter the Voice of America and Radio Marti. All of these activities are taking place without commissioner votes. What is happening is they are being done at the staff level through investigations and threats so that you get maximum result without the possibility of review by a commissioner like myself or even the courts.

Micah Loewinger: If I understand you correctly, the authority that you're supposed to wield as a vote on this five, now four-person commission has been rendered ineffectual?

Anna Gomez: Yes. It's not unheard of for the staff to take actions. We have a very large docket and so you need to do things on delegated authority. We are seeing actions by the commission that should be done at my level. For example, approving a major merger while demanding that the providers agree to, for example, eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the company.

Micah Loewinger: Are you referring to news that the FCC had granted Verizon approval for a $20 billion deal? In the announcement approving the deal, the FCC cited Verizon's commitment to, "ending DEI related practices."

Anna Gomez: If I had known that this was coming, I would have demanded that it be done at the commission level. It's not our agency's function to prosecute diversity, equity, and inclusion. The argument is that fairness for all requires discrimination against some, and that's just not true. Diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are not about discrimination. They are about fairness. We have this undefined, unproven, and indistinguishable standard that these companies are being held against called invidious discrimination. That's being used to target. It is incumbent that this commission identify what it means by invidious discrimination and what evidence they have it even exists. Otherwise, we're just enforcing against things we don't like.

What alarms me about it is that capitulation breeds capitulation. I keep hoping that companies will get more courageous and push back because the commission does not have authority under the law, under the Constitution, to go after these practices.

Micah Loewinger: Speaking of capitulation, we're currently seeing CBS grapple with an investigation from the FCC. In short, President Trump took issue with the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. The FCC is investigating 60 Minutes and CBS for alleged intentional news distortion in that edit of the Kamala Harris interview. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr also used that term "news distortion" in his posts on X when criticizing coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia on Comcast stations, which would include NBC and MSNBC.

Anna Gomez: The Communications Act prohibits the FCC from censorship. News distortion must involve a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report. The broadcasters have to have deliberately distorted a factual news report, and not the national network but the local broadcaster because they are the ones that actually hold the license. It is clear that none of these cases meet the news distortion standard, which is very hard to prove because you have to have that intentionality.

The 60 Minutes case is really obvious. Now that the FCC has posted the video of the interview, it is clear that there was no intentional distortion here. However, the threats have a chilling effect, which is part of the reason this violates our First Amendment and the freedom of the press because no station wants to be dragged before the FCC in an investigation of its practices. I am hearing from local broadcasters that they are telling their reporters to please be careful about what they say and how they report. That is the opposite of what I would hope these independent broadcasters do.

Micah Loewinger: In recent months, public broadcasters, such as our producing station WNYC, my employer, are also being investigated by the FCC. Chairman Brendan Carr has said he's concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials. What do you make of this investigation? Where do you think it's headed?

Anna Gomez: The threat against the public broadcasters, as you note, is based on their sponsorship notices. The broadcasters are very careful about how they do those notices. In that initial letter, there is actually no allegation of a specific instance where that is an issue. In fact, the letter went to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR, neither of which actually have licenses with the FCC.

Since then, the FCC has opened up some investigations against these local broadcasters. The complaint is supposed to be about the sponsorship notices, but that's, in fact, not what it is because when you hear this being talked about on the Hill, when you talk about defunding the public broadcasters, it is entirely because they disagree with the content and their news editorial decisions.

Micah Loewinger: This is not the first time that the FCC has faced pressure from the executive to, effectively, weaponize its broadcast licensing authority. You've pointed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his relationship with the agency back in 1939. What do you see in that president and how is it different now?

Anna Gomez: There's multiple examples. There's, as you note, FDR pressuring then-Chairman Fly over permitting radio stations to also own newspapers because FDR didn't like the way he was being covered. Then you had President Kennedy pressuring the chairman of the FCC to act against NBC because he was again unhappy with how he was being portrayed.

Those chairs showed a lot of courage in telling the presidents at the time that they would not bow to their political pressure and take adverse action against their broadcasters because the president did not like the content of their coverage.

Micah Loewinger: Recently, you've been on something of a publicity tour. You've voiced your opposition to a number of new investigations by your agency. You're obviously speaking to me right now. What do you hope to accomplish?

Anna Gomez: What I hope to get out of it is not just to educate people, but also to encourage people to stand up, to speak up, and to push back, because we must push back against violations of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is a pillar of our democracy and it is very important that we protect it.

Micah Loewinger: You said recently in a speech, "If I'm removed from my seat on the commission, let it be said plainly, it wasn't because I failed to do my job, it's because I insisted on doing it." [chuckles] I liked that line. [chuckles]

Anna Gomez: [laughs] Well, thank you. Removing minority members of independent commissions again is a reflection of this administration's policy of control and censorship. I also see it as a sign of weakness and a sign of fear. It's fear of any dissenting voice that pushes back against this administration. Now, unlawfully removing me from office would disregard the will of Congress. The FCC is set up as an independent commission. I was confirmed by the Senate and we are overseen by Congress. Bipartisan majority intended for me to serve my term. It would also violate the spirit of the law that governs this independent agency. So I'm going to continue to stand firm in my beliefs and speak up in defense of the First Amendment and on behalf of consumers.

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Micah Loewinger: Anna M. Gomez is Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. Commissioner, thank you very much.

Anna Gomez: Thank you.

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Micah Loewinger: Coming up on the shortwaves, pirate radio is alive and well. This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Over the last few weeks, we've been airing our special series The Divided Dial, hosted by Katie Thornton. The first season was all about the right-wing takeover of AM and FM talk radio. This season is all about shortwave radio. We've talked about the history of government propaganda on the medium and, more recently, the rise of cults and extremists. This final episode features the story of a present-day battle playing out on the shortwave frequencies between two very different groups. Here's Katie.

Katie Thornton: Okay. 11:07 AM, May 18th, 2024. A little over a year ago, I tried for the first time ever to pick up a shortwave radio broadcast. I'm out in Wisconsin. [seagulls squawk] As if on cue. Okay. It was a really nice spring day, if a little windy, so I was outside. Power it up. This is FM. I found a little shortwave radio that my grandma had given my parents years ago before she died. Wide or narrow? I don't know what that means. It took me a while to figure out how to use the thing. Just minimized the treble to try to get some of the static out. This is such a stupid question, but does wind blow radio waves?

How to find the frequencies that were active. Okay, I'm hearing a voice. 9333. No, come back. I feel like Jodie Foster in Contact right now. Like when her signal goes out and she thinks the aliens are gone, I'm like, "That's me right now." Eventually, I started picking stuff up. Oh, my gosh. Voices, voices, voices. The antenna's broken, so I'm just going to grab a pliers quick and squeeze it into place. What? Okay, I'm holding the pliers on the antenna. I'm getting way better reception. Let me. No pliers. Pliers. Oh, my God. I think I'm an antenna. Let me try going back to 9330. 11,024 hertz.

Oh, my God. Banger. Honestly, I'm going to keep surfing. Surfing the waves. Oh, my God. I just got it. Christian rock. Come back. I have to say, I've never been so excited to hear Christian rock. Once I got the hang of it, I started to pick up a lot of stuff.

Radio Broadcaster: This is a matter of life and death for the church. The church will not repopulate itself. I'm sorry.

Katie Thornton: There's so many now. I heard World's Last Chance.

World's Last Chance: Okay, now we're going to get into the usage of the word almighty in the New Testament. Go with me to Revelation.

Katie Thornton: I heard Brother RG Stair.

Brother RG Stair: The baby that is [unintelligible 00:16:05] either going to heaven or hell, get that.

Katie Thornton: I was just so excited. It was just me on my own for hours. Kind of like being caught in a social media scroll, but a lot less passive. Eventually, I filled in my dad when he came into the room. Oh. You know what kind of station I heard earlier? It was just beep, beep, beep, [onomatopoeia], which is usually like a code that somebody's receiving. Isn't that crazy? Content be damned. I was loving the shortwaves. I can play it for you.

This is Season 2 of The Divided Dial from On the Media. I'm your host, Katie Thornton. This season, we've been talking all about shortwave radio, how it went from a utopian experiment in global communications to a haven for the far right, even if that's not necessarily what a lot of shortwave listeners want to hear. In many parts of the world, shortwave radio is still a lifeline. Here in the US, though, these days it's mostly a hobby. Right now, there's a battle playing out on our shortwaves. It's taking place between two parties with very different visions for how the shortwaves should be used. That ideological battle between the pirates and the profiteers tells us a lot about how we regard our public airwaves.

On this final episode of this season of The Divided Dial, we go deep into the future of the shortwaves and why they might matter more than we think. In the years since I had that first solitary channel surfing experience, I've been able to tune in together with other shortwave listeners.

Speaker: I have six or seven antennas in the attic.

Katie Thornton: In their living rooms, in their modern-day radio shacks.

Speaker: This is an HOA, so I can't do a lot outside.

Katie Thornton: One of the folks I listened with was this guy, Matt Todd.

Matt Todd: It's a loop on the ground. You can kind of see it out there.

Katie Thornton: Oh, yes. Yes, I see where it is. He lives about a half hour north of where I live in Minneapolis. Not unlike David Goren from Episode 1, Matt is a radio enthusiast who likes to record what he hears. Another one of shortwave's informal archivists. He doesn't just record shortwave, he records all sorts of radio. In fact, I first reached out to him when I was reporting Season 1 because I found some clips he'd recorded from Salem Media Group during the Capitol Riot on January 6th. Back then, I didn't even know shortwave was still a thing.

Matt listens to the radio all the time. Aviation radio, police and fire scanners, and lots of shortwave. Like a lot of the folks who sent us the voice memos we played at the end of the last episode, he was especially excited when he was flipping through the shortwave band and heard On the Media, which we've been airing on a shortwave station, WRMI, out of Florida for several months.

Katya Rogers: Hi, WRMI Listeners, my name is Katya Rogers. I'm the executive producer of On the Media. Right now, we're making a podcast and a radio series all about shortwave radio and [unintelligible 00:19:33]

Katie Thornton: Meta. Huh? People have been writing us in. It's nice.

Matt Todd: Good.

Katie Thornton: I was surprised at how many people were just so thrilled to hear it on there.

Matt Todd: On the Media is different than what you'd normally hear on a lot of it. It's not God stuff and it's not right-wing talk. It's something different.

Katie Thornton: It's not that Matt hates the God stuff or the right-wing talk, but like so many shortwave fans, he got into it for the surprise, the worldliness. In the last several decades, as lots of countries have backed away from their government-run services and the private stations have been dominated by big names like Brother Stair or World's Last Chance who snatch up tons of cheap airtime in bulk, there's just not as much variety anymore.

That's why Matt and lots of other shortwave lovers have taken a special interest in shortwave pirates. You know, people broadcasting without a license to do so. To be clear, broadcast without a license is illegal. We're not advocating for it. If you do it on, say, the FM dial, where there are relatively few frequencies and lots of licensed stations whose owners hate interference, the FCC comes down on you pretty hard and fast, but on the shortwave frequencies, there's plenty of free space and almost no policing.

Speaker: 1, 2, 3. Can anybody hear me?

Speaker: Can anybody hear me?

Speaker: 4015, let your friends know.

Speaker: [crosstalk] relaying [crosstalk]

Speaker: Yes, radio.

Katie Thornton: Matt has this thing called a software-defined radio. Basically, it's a radio he plugs into a computer so he doesn't have to sit there and turn through every possible frequency and through long stretches of static. He can plug this thing into a computer screen and see what frequencies are active and then click over and listen.

Speaker: What the hell is going on?

Katie Thornton: He can also use it to record not just a single station, but a whole stretch of shortwave frequencies, like as if you TiVo'd every channel. It's pretty cool. Technically, Matt and I sat down on January 3rd of this year, but we were surfing the airwaves from a few nights prior, New Year's Eve, because holidays are known as especially active times for shortwave radio pirates.

Speaker: You're tuned in to [unintelligible 00:22:11] Radio. New Year's Eve extravaganza.

Katie Thornton: There was a huge variety of music from old blues to synth-pop. Sometimes the people broadcasting just sang along over the recording, karaoke style.

Matt Todd: [unintelligible 00:22:32]. There's another one that came on there.

Katie Thornton: Someone popped on right around midnight Eastern time to play a cheesy recording of Auld Lang Syne. Someone else played old Casey Kasem broadcasts.

Matt Todd: There's one around Christmas that does broadcasting like FDR speeches and some stuff from that era. I think he even called it WFDR.

Katie Thornton: There was one guy who just played the sound of dogs barking over the song Cars by Gary Newman for an hour. Oh, okay. This is divine. We were having a really good time tuning in. Matt had all these other files on his computer, from pirates who have taken to the shortwaves in recent years.

Speaker: Happy Halloween to everybody out there in the ionic fear radio land.

Matt Todd: Halloween's the big-- That's like the Super Bowl of them.

Katie Thornton: It's not just holidays. On any given weekend, any given day, you can hear a lot of pirates hijacking the shortwaves.

Speaker: [unintelligible 00:23:43] 4015.

Speaker: Wolverine and WDDR.

Katie Thornton: The pirates have been busy. They've made pop-up stations entirely devoted to things like bowling, comedy, or jazz and bebop. Random stations come and go, like Shrimp Boat Radio, which allegedly broadcasts from a literal shrimp boat.

Shrimp Boat Radio: We'll talk about anything from politics to shrimping.

Powhouse Radio: This is Powhouse Radio.

Shrimp Boat Radio: You didn't really expect something normal, did you?

Katie Thornton: Thunder Chicken Radio, Radio Nonsense.

Radio Garbanzo: We're Radio Garbanzo.

Katie Thornton: Boombox Radio. Radio Free Whatever. One person I spoke with described the pirate stations as watering holes where people create the radio station that they always wanted to have. People told me they hear more musical variety on pirate shortwave than they ever do on big streaming services.

Speaker: Don't ask who you are. It's another world.

Speaker: The fact is that pirate radio is alive and well.

Katie Thornton: This is Bennett Cobb. He's retired now, but for decades, he was a trade journalist working the FCC beat. Today he runs a blog covering all sorts of weird stuff that can be found on the radio waves. Suffice to say, Bennett also listens to the radio a lot and he also hears a lot of pirates.

Bennett Cobb: Some of these stations have literally lasted decades.

Katie Thornton: He remembers this one he first picked up years ago.

Bennett Cobb: I remember that station vividly because the guy running it believed he was the Antichrist. He apparently had some kind of an accident where he cut himself and there was some bleeding or he didn't bleed or something, or whatever, and this transformed him into the Antichrist.

Katie Thornton: Usually, these shortwave pirates aren't bringing you more of the same preaching or ultra-conservative talk. For the most part, they've reclaimed the airwaves for something a little lighter. Yes, for some political conversation, maybe for claims of being the Antichrist, but also just for some fun.

Bennett Cobb: The prospect of an international audience for your broadcast, whether you are playing a religious message or you're playing Lynyrd Skynyrd, is just too attractive to pass up.

Speaker: The immediate appeal is being able to play your favorite music and rant as you like, whether it is pro-Christ or Antichrist, and be heard.

Katie Thornton: To many in the shortwave world, this is what the future of the medium sounds like. Still scratchy as hell, but unexpected. Freeform. An ethereal space like none other, where people can hear some truly wild material from the other side of the country or the other side of the world. No Wi-Fi needed. It turns out that pirates aren't the only ones trying something novel on shortwave. There's another group with a very different vision for the future of the airwaves. If they get their way, the shortwaves might sound less like this and more like this. That's coming up after the break. This is The Divided Dial from On the Media.

This is On the Media. I'm Katie Thornton, host of The Divided Dial series. We're right in the middle of the last episode of our second season. Right before the break, I told you that another group has recently shown interest in the shortwaves. Bennett Cobb told me the story, which begins several years ago. Because he's a huge fan of radio, Bennett likes to read applications that have been submitted to the FCC specifically for what are called experimental licenses.

Bennett Cobb: A typical example would be if a satellite examines hydrology. Water uses natural resources.

Katie Thornton: Basically, experimental licenses are for folks who are trying to invent or perfect new technology that uses radio waves in some way. The FCC lets you apply for temporary permission to use specific frequencies. It's pretty cool. Like, the federal government sets aside some of our airwaves to see if the next Marconi is out there.

Bennett Cobb: Many of these are university satellite programs. The other big category would be product development.

Katie Thornton: The FCC's rules generally prohibit making money off these experiments, but companies can use them to test out new devices, see if they work before bringing them to market. Like Bennett once saw an application for this thing that looked like a chandelier.

Bennett Cobb: But actually contained antennas that would jam communications within your own home. This has something to do with fighting back against Wi-Fi or something. Instead of telling your kids to turn off the phone and go play outside, you would turn on this massive chandelier, which would prevent all type of electronic use in the household.

Katie Thornton: That one didn't seem to go anywhere. Bottom line here, though, these are applications to use the public airwaves, so the applications are publicly available. Bennett loves poring through them, even if oddball ideas like the anti-Wi-Fi chandelier are the exciting exception to the rule.

Bennett Cobb: I go through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these licenses. The overwhelming majority of them are not particularly interesting.

Katie Thornton: A few years back, he noticed something out of the ordinary.

Bennett Cobb: There were these applications being filed from companies with peculiar names. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing.

Katie Thornton: What were the names of the entities?

Bennett Cobb: One of them is called County Information Services, which is the most blasé, unavailing name. It's not clear that this station has anything to do with counties.

Katie Thornton: There was another thing that made these applications stand out.

Bennett Cobb: The fact that these were shortwave. Shortwave experimental applications are rare. The FCC grants hundreds of these licenses a month. It's very rare to see one that deals with shortwave at all.

Katie Thornton: By now, you all know that shortwave radio waves are really good at covering long distances, thanks to them bouncing off the upper atmosphere and coming back to Earth. Shortwaves aren't good for short distances. Things like that anti-Wi-Fi chandelier, or even most radio sensors for scientific experiments, they wouldn't use the shortwaves. Plus, shortwave, as you've heard, isn't super high fidelity. Seeing even one, let alone multiple, applications to experiment on shortwave, that surprised Bennett. He wanted to know more. No big deal. Applicants looking to experiment with the public airwaves have to include a statement saying what they're going to do and why.

Bennett Cobb: They're also allowed to make a formal request that that information not be exposed publicly.

Katie Thornton: Most of these mysterious applications had requested that the FCC keep that information out of the public eye. The FCC overwhelmingly obliged. You know, trade secrets.

Bennett Cobb: The fact that the details were withheld made it even more intriguing.

Katie Thornton: Bennett couldn't read most of the contents of these applications, but he could see that the FCC was okaying them. These experimenters were getting access to the air. Beyond that, Bennett had hit a wall until he met a guy with inside knowledge of these applications. That guy gave Bennett the dirt on these companies with peculiar names and why they wanted to get on the shortwaves.

Bennett Cobb: It's private, encrypted buy and sell instructions.

Katie Thornton: Buy and sell instructions for high-speed international trading, as in stocks, equities, the market. Because when it comes to the market, speed matters.

Bennett Cobb: The faster the trade can be completed, the more money that can be made, because these are very small changes in price.

Katie Thornton: It turns out there's a corner of the finance world where people have gone to insane lengths to shave fractions of a second off transaction times. Finance guys have invented new fiber optic cables that might go faster than existing ones. They've bored through mountains to lay a more direct fiber path. There is a lawsuit over misuse of microwaves. It's a whole thing.

To date, these guys have typically had their computers send these buy-sell instructions via satellite or the Internet over lightning-fast ocean ocean-spanning fiber cables. Using those experimental licenses, they found that shortwave signals get across the world faster than the Internet, faster than satellites, a whopping 9 milliseconds faster according to one licensee. A century-old technology won. These high-speed traders, they aren't looking to broadcast shows or tinker with anti-Wi-Fi chandeliers, what they're after really is real estate. Real estate on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Nathalia Foditsch: Every time we are listening to the radio, watching TV or using a banking app on a mobile device, we are making use of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Katie Thornton: This is Nathalia Foditsch. She's an attorney who works on telecom issues and has written about access to the electromagnetic spectrum, which she says?

Nathalia Foditsch: Is like an invisible rainbow.

Katie Thornton: The electromagnetic spectrum is basically a spectrum of visible and invisible light. We can see a small portion of these lightwaves, that's the visible light part. It sits in the middle of the spectrum. Up above that, in the really high frequencies, you get to things like X-ray, which is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, not the Federal Communications Commission. Below our visible light range are all the radio waves. Those are monitored by the FCC and another group, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which manages all the federal government's use of radio, military, aviation. On the invisible radio rainbow, a lot is possible.

Nathalia Foditsch: Whenever you use your cell phone, whenever you use a GPS--

Bennett Cobb: The AM broadcaster, the FM broadcaster, the shortwave broadcaster, television, satellite communications.

Katie Thornton: Satellites for scientific experiments and weather.

Bennett Cobb: Hobby and experimental uses. There is the amateur radio.

Katie Thornton: Amateur radio, you know, hams doing the walkie-talkie thing.

Bennett Cobb: There's the radio for business purposes, for police purposes, law enforcement.

Nathalia Foditsch: Some frequencies are better for shorter distances, some are better for longer distances.

Katie Thornton: Sometimes it even helps you shop.

Bennett Cobb: When you approach a grocery store and the doors open magically, there is a radio transmitter above the door that detects the presence of the person and opens the door.

Katie Thornton: All these radio devices, they start with a transmitter. They encode sound, data, or images into a beam of this invisible light on Nathalia's invisible rainbow.

Nathalia Foditsch: Imagine radio coming in on blue and Wi-Fi coming through on green.

Katie Thornton: The light gets sent out on a specific frequency to your home radio set or your cell phone or that little sensor above the grocery store door. Your receiver decodes it, and voila, the door opens, you check Instagram, you hear the radio. It all happens like that. Radio waves can do a lot. It turns out the shortwaves, which are basically a stretch of frequencies above AM, like if you imagine your AM dial going off really far to the right, the shortwaves, while they aren't good for too much, they can do more than just carry scratchy voices. They can carry data, codes, instructions for a computer to follow.

That brings us back to Bennett's sleuthing. He knew that these applicants wanted to use the shortwaves for trading, but the trail had gone cold because the FCC, at the request of the guys with the experimental licenses, was withholding information. The details were off-limits to the public. That is until 2023, when the parent companies behind many of these experimental licenses got together and made a formal on-the-record request.

Bennett Cobb: They have come out publicly with a petition to the FCC stating, "Yes, we have been operating these experimental stations for trading purposes."

Katie Thornton: These parent companies have names like Virtue Financial Incorporated, Tower Research Capital LLC, DRW Holdings LLC, Jump Trading Group. What they said to the FCC was, "Hey, those secret applications, we're the ones behind them. We've been using them to show that high-speed trading is possible on shortwave, and we think it's time that you, the FCC, let us use some of those shortwaves to do this for real. No more experiments. It's time for us to make some money."

Bennett Cobb: As a group, they call themselves the Shortwave Modernization Coalition.

Katie Thornton: The Shortwave Modernization Coalition. Not radio lovers who love broadcasting, but a bunch of Wall Street guys, tech bros, and venture capitalists who want the FCC to let them use the airwaves to make more money. In their vision for the future of the shortwaves, there's no human touch.

Bennett Cobb: The trading is arranged by computers. There's not a human voice speaking. Then, of course, you wouldn't know what they were transmitting. Nobody could decode it.

Katie Thornton: To everyone and everything other than the computers receiving the instructions, data sounds like nothing, maybe some static, just blips between computers. I want to clarify something. The Shortwave Modernization Coalition isn't proposing to do away with shortwave broadcasting. Within the shortwaves, you have some frequencies allocated for broadcasts, some for emergencies, some for the ham radio guys, et cetera.

At this point, the Shortwave Modernization Coalition has only asked the FCC to give them a small portion of mostly unused shortwave frequencies, ones that are currently set aside for things like backup emergency communications. The FCC hasn't made a final decision yet. What this group is asking for, essentially, is that the FCC fundamentally changed the purpose of this portion of the shortwave band away from public interest and toward private gain. Remember from Season 1, the electromagnetic spectrum are radio waves. They're supposed to belong to the public. Nathalia Foditsch again.

Nathalia Foditsch: These frequencies, although they're invisible, this invisible rainbow is a public resource.

Katie Thornton: A public resource owned by all of us and regulated by our elected governments.

Nathalia Foditsch: Like national parks or waterways, which means that it should be managed always thinking about the public interest.

Katie Thornton: Like water or the land beneath national parks, the airwaves are really valuable. Over the years, more and more of the public land of the spectrum has been privatized, often leased out to for-profit corporations like Verizon and AT&T. For many decades, that's been the model of how the US government makes money off this public resource. They lease out these frequencies, often with long lease terms, by auctioning them to the highest bidder. Those companies then use part of the electromagnetic spectrum they're leasing from us to sell us things like Wi-Fi access. Legally, those corporations are still required to serve the public interest. With things like broadband Internet still unaffordable to many Americans, it's easy to argue that they don't always do that.

Historically, this land grab has happened on the more capable parts of the spectrum, the frequencies that are good at, say, carrying Wi-Fi from a 5G tower to your phone. Telecom companies haven't seen the shortwaves as worth trying to get. They're not used to transmit the Internet. A solar flare can knock them out. Even the FCC has tended to ignore them. In fact, right now, the FCC doesn't even auction off the shortwaves. You can just apply, pay some fees, and if you qualify, you can get on there rent-free.

Bennett Cobb: You see, this is what's so interesting about it. First of all, as the other radio frequencies get more and more jammed up with things like Wi-Fi, microwave, and satellites, where is the available real estate? Well, it's in the shortwave. Technology is improving its ability to use frequencies in general, and the trading is a perfect example of that. Who would have thought that shortwave is now fabulously valuable to Wall Street?

Katie Thornton: I asked Bennett if he thinks there's any possibility this thing might not go through, that the FCC might say no to the Shortwave Modernization Coalition's request to use some shortwave frequencies for trading. He thinks, not a chance.

Bennett Cobb: I don't think that's likely at all. I think in general, this whole area is such a backwoods that the people wanting to take advantage of it are counting on the widespread lack of knowledge. I think given the predilections of this administration, I think they'll say, "Go knock yourself out. You know, make a ton of money and go have fun with it."

Katie Thornton: The Shortwave Modernization Coalition's formal petition to use the airwaves for trading is going to force the FCC to look at their shortwave rules for the first time in decades. This April, after the FCC opened what they called the Delete, Delete, Delete proceedings in which they asked for public comment on any regulations that people thought could be rolled back- very Trump 2.0- Bennett and some buddies, including an old Voice of America guy, they made a parallel proposal.

Bennett Cobb: I have recommended that the FCC do what is being done in Europe, which is to reduce the minimum power to a lower power level and a smaller investment, and allow--

Katie Thornton: The FCC has this old World War II era rule that says that if you want to get a legal shortwave broadcast license, you have to build a station that puts out at least 50,000 watts of power. That's a ton of power-

Bennett Cobb: -which means it's very expensive. The old rules make it impractical to do this except illegally, which is what the pirates are doing. I predict that if the power level were lowered, more people would do it, and I say let them do it. Let flowers bloom, see what people would do with it. The big question is, is the FCC going to allow that or will the FCC simply take the Shortwave Modernization Coalition, give them what they want, and forget the rest of it?

Katie Thornton: The FCC hasn't responded to their proposal yet. Bennett says all of this doesn't even necessarily mean that the traders can't also get on the shortwaves. You do sort of imagine that there could be a somewhat harmonious coexistence of these entities on the shortwaves?

Bennett Cobb: Oh yes, if it's engineered properly.

Katie Thornton: Unlike on a lot of the rest of the spectrum, there are still a lot of shortwaves to go around. Bennett says we just have to make space for everyone. It sounds naïve, almost fantastical, but honestly, when you describe how shortwave radio works today in practice, it also sounds kind of fantastical. These are globe-spanning airwaves we have to share, not just nationally, but internationally. In fact, there's this group called the High Frequency Coordination Conference, made up of everyone from private station owners to government agencies from all over the world. They get together twice a year and decide which countries get to use which frequencies and when, based on the weather and the sun, it's almost like a Radio UN. It's all voluntary, nothing's binding, but it's been going on for 35 years and pretty much everyone adheres to it.

Maybe you're asking yourself, "Why should we care? These frequencies they're proposing to use for trading, they aren't really being used anyway. Even if the traders eventually wanted to grab up more shortwave frequencies like the ones currently being used for broadcasting, do we really care if this weird radio that not very many people listen to anyway and that has some pretty heinous stuff on it, do we really care if that goes away?" I hear you, I do. Part of me wondered that, too. I grappled with it for a long time. These airwaves, they're ours. Even when the government lends them out, the idea is that we, the public, get some kind of benefit back. Trading on shortwaves, there's nothing in it for us.

Bennett Cobb: These are exclusively private communication links. There's no public interest in it at all.

Katie Thornton: This shift in use, this permission to let people use more of the public airwaves for private gain, it would be in line with this administration's approach to the rest of the spectrum. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress recommended that the FCC start auctioning off lots more frequencies to the highest bidder. These are frequencies that might have otherwise been used for things like affordable rural broadband. Just recently, Congress introduced a new bill that would require the federal government to auction off a ton of frequencies to offset Trump's proposed tax cuts to the rich.

President Trump: Would restore FCC auction authority and end our spectrum drought.

Senator Blackburn: Recouping it going through the auction process would yield billions and billions of dollars, as much as $100 billion. We need that because we are in a race for it with China.

Katie Thornton: In reporting this series, I listened to the good, bad, and ugly of shortwave broadcasting. There's lots of ugly, but I'd still rather have that than watch the spectrum get handed over piece by piece to various profiteers. Or at least, if that happens, give us something back. How about funding public media? The electromagnetic spectrum is the invisible backbone of our media ecosystem, the infrastructure of how we disseminate information. Now, just like Medicare or education or the Voice of America, it's yet another one of our public resources that's being eroded or turned over to private hands.

Worldwide Christian Radio: Worldwide Christian Radio.

World's Last Chance Radio: World's Last Chance Radio [crosstalk]

Speaker: The Earth is flat, and God tells you so.

Katie Thornton: There is resistance on the shortwaves from people like Bennett and his fellow shortwave advocates asking the FCC to make it easier for folks to broadcast without million-dollar high-powered antennas.

Bennett Cobb: Yes, but listen to it. It's like a fine watch. They're going to the UK.

Katie Thornton: They're showing us that it isn't just bigwig financial guys who get to make demands of our institutions. The rest of us can, too. There's the pirates.

Speaker: Can anybody hear me?

Speaker: Radio 1.

Katie Thornton: I'm not saying they're firing up their bootleg transmitters and thinking, "I'm going to illegally play dogs barking over Gary Newman tunes to protest the electromagnetic spectrum getting privatized," but in practice, that's kind of the spirit.

In my journey into the shortwaves, there's something I kept coming back to: the shortwaves may not be the most effective place to insist on continued public access, but maybe for that very reason, it's the most possible place to try. A place to practice putting our foot down to keep the public in the public airwaves.

That's it for this season of The Divided Dial. This series was written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OTM's executive producer, Katya Rogers. Music and sound design is by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. This series is made possible in part with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Special thanks this week to Matt Todd, who you heard from at the beginning of the episode, for sharing some of his pirate radio archives with us.

Because this is our final episode, we have some extra thank yous. Thank you to Michael Ryan Brennan for the series art. To Jeff White at WRMI who helped us get On the Media out on shortwave twice a week for nearly a year now. To Steve Uckerman for sound effects. To the contributors to and masterminds behind the Shortwave Listening Post blog, which amasses shortwave stories and allows people to share great shortwave audio from their personal collections, which was really helpful to me as I reported this series. And to all of the many, many people who shared their time and expertise with me for interviews, and to those who wrote us or left us voice memos after hearing our show on shortwave.

Regardless of whether or not you heard from them in this final series, each of these interviews and messages was so helpful in putting this project together. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next time. This is The Divided Dial.

Micah Loewinger: On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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