There is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get your OWN local radio station - but almost nobody knows about it. There are fewer than 70 days left to apply - so who will step up to the microphones?

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Scan across just about any radio dial in the entire country, and you'll hear exactly the same big city, big corporate programming: Rush Limbaugh, Fox Sports, Top 40, NPR.

But what about local programming? Where are the reporters covering the city council or the county board of supervisors? High school football or Little League? Bake sales or community events? This kind of homegrown programming was once the heart and soul of radio. It formed a public square that informed listeners about the community's very identity.

We've missed that spirit of radio since 1996, when Bill Clinton and Congress decided to allow a few national companies to program the entire nation with their corporate choices of music, sports, and political talk, local needs be damned.

But thanks to activists ranging from the Philadelphia area Prometheus Radio to the Davis, California non-profit Common Frequency, the true heart and soul of radio may be coming back -- if people in local communities choose to be the media they want to hear.

The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees broadcasting, has been under pressure to allow new low power FM frequencies so that a diverse array of local people can once again have a voice in their own communities. Those frequencies are typically 100 watts in power, and broadcast about ten miles from the source. It was easy to find available frequencies in rural areas, but predictably, the big corporate engineers lobbied the FCC hard to prevent new stations in urban centers. (They claimed these small radio stations would interfere with their giant signals.) But the little engineer who could, Common Frequency's Technical Director Todd Urick, provided the FCC with incontrovertible studies which showed how new local radio stations could be carved out in urban centers nationwide.

That paved the way for hundreds of new opportunities for community groups to get their own radio stations in areas where their voices are squelched. Now there is a chance for local people in local towns to get on a microphone that can potentially reach tens or hundreds of thousands of local listeners. It's a once in a lifetime chance to feature local musicians, local politics, local events and more. Most urban centers will have more than a dozen available frequencies to give voice to the community, and in rural communities, the sky is the limit for people to step up to their own microphones.

But will all of those frequencies actually end up becoming real radio stations? So far, the answer is unclear. Non-profit groups, unions, tribes, schools and government agencies need to apply for these very scarce frequencies, and the clock is ticking: the window to apply with the FCC will open October 15 and will close -- forever -- just two weeks after that.

But despite outreach efforts, even from the FCC itself, very few even know about this opportunity to broadcast exists. It would be a shame to let this chance go to waste.

Yes, it will cost some money to get started, and yes, it will take commitment to see it through. But for the cost of just a few political ads, communities can again have a vibrant voice in their communities -- forever.

So who will stand up to the microphones?

Learn more at www.lpfmNOW.org , and be the media you want to hear on our publicly owned airwaves!

Authors Website: http://www.suewilsonreports.com/

Authors Bio:

Sue Wilson tells important stories which move politicians to act.

The Emmy winning director of the media reform documentary "Broadcast Blues" and editor of SueWilsonReports.com, Sue recently founded the Media Action Center. Wilson was 1987's California State University Long Beach "Outstanding Graduate" in Radio/TV/Film.

In the early '90's, she won Emmys for specials she produced for Jim Lampley, Bree Walker, Sylvia Lopez and others at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles, and then turned the spotlight on wasteful government spending for Sacramento Fox TV station KTXL, where her Emmy winning stories changed national, state, and local spending policies.

In 1998 , Wilson broke national TV news of pharmaceuticals appearing in drinking water, which forced the US EPA to begin testing.

Her AP, RTNDA, and PRNDI award winning radio show "Healing Healthcare" at Sacramento NPR station KXJZ in the early 2000's helped put more nurses on the job in California.

"Broadcast Blues" shows how poor U.S. media policy is destroying discourse in this country. It reminds us that We the People own the public airwaves, and we can and must Take the Media Back! See her website to obtain DVDs and for updated information on our broken system of broadcasting.

And join the actions at MediaActionCenter.net to hold broadcasters - and the Federal Communications Commission - accountable to the public interest!