By Daniel Schulman
The theme of the sermon was “get off the dime” and the message resonated with Clark Parrish, who, at the time, felt he was in need of some direction. Not long before, Parrish, then in his mid-forties, had left a job with a national Christian broadcasting network, where he’d spent close to a decade. Now he was casting about for a new pursuit, figuring out what he was going to do with his life. The sermon brought everything into focus. Among a congregation of thousands, it seemed that God was speaking directly to him. He left church that day imbued with a sense of purpose. He knew what he needed to do.
Weeks later, in November 2002, Parrish founded Radio Assist Ministry, a nonprofit whose mission is to spread the gospel over the airwaves and to aid other Christian organizations in doing the same. That month, he also formed an engineering firm, World Radio Link, that would help broadcasters construct their networks, prepare Federal Communications Commission filings, and broker radio spectrum, selling frequencies obtained through FCC auctions.
Parrish’s timing couldn’t have been better. The FCC was then preparing to solicit applications for FM translators for the first time in five years. Unlike a radio station, a translator, which resembles a stereo receiver in shape and size, doesn’t originate programming, it simply receives and broadcasts a signal. Historically, translators have been used to fill in a broadcaster’s coverage area, a means to extend a signal that would otherwise be blocked by geographical features, such as hills or mountains. In some rural areas, where placing a radio station is not financially viable, translators provide programming on frequencies that would otherwise broadcast static.
Starting in the early 1990s, though, translators, or repeaters as they’re sometimes known, began to take on a new purpose. For noncommercial broadcasters, whom the FCC allows to feed certain repeaters via satellite, they have proved a low-cost way (no staff, minimal equipment and overhead) to rapidly establish a broad radio presence. A translator setup typically runs between $4,000 and $10,000 (not including the cost of leasing space on a radio tower, on which the device’s antenna is situated), and, with a satellite uplink, a broadcaster can beam its programming to any number of translators simultaneously. Evangelical Christian organizations in particular have seized on this model as a means of spreading the gospel. And they have prospered. Take the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, an organization that was recently in the news when it spearheaded a campaign to stop Ford, the automobile manufacturer, from advertising its products in gay and lesbian magazines. Wildmon first learned of the FCC’s decision to allow noncommercial broadcasters to beam programming via satellite to translators in the late 1980s. He immediately grasped how this could benefit his organization’s broadcast ambitions and, by extension, advance the group’s conservative agenda. Within four years, between 1993 and 1997, the American Family Association was broadcasting on 156 stations in twenty-seven states. Its broadcast arm, American Family Radio, boasts on its Web site that translators allowed the organization to build “more stations in a shorter period of time than any other broadcaster in the history of broadcasting.” Relying heavily on translators, Christian organizations such as the Educational Media Foundation and Calvary Satellite Network International (CSN) have enjoyed equally impressive growth. “You can do this dirt-cheap and the fact is you avoid any ownership limits,” said Harold Feld, the senior vice president of the Media Access Project, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm that specializes in telecommunications. The FCC has long been warned that this loophole could be exploited to create national radio networks, according to Feld, but the commission has dismissed those concerns as “speculative and alarmist.” He added, “The sad truth is that the agency is not very imaginative about these sorts of things.” But even now that the practice has moved well beyond the realm of imagination, with broadcasters employing hundreds of translators to forge nationwide footprints, the FCC, seemingly unperturbed, has taken no action to discourage it.
Around the time that Wildmon discovered translators, so did Clark Parrish. Then living in Marathon, Florida, midway down the Keys, and working as a repairman in an electronics shop, he had been taping a local Christian radio station, KILA, to share its programming with friends. He was particularly fond of a long-running radio drama called “Unshackled,” which recounts the stories of people who say their lives have been transformed by Jesus. Using translators, Parrish realized, KILA’s programming could reach a wider audience. In the late 1980s, he and a few friends established Tower of Praise, a nonprofit whose initial goal was to acquire a translator and use it to pipe the station’s programming into their community. At the time, though, the organization was unable to obtain a translator.
In 1992, Parrish moved to Idaho and put his electronics experience to work for KAWZ, a fledgling Christian radio station in Twin Falls. The station was looking to grow. With Parrish’s help, it now serves as the broadcasting hub of CSN and its nearly 400 stations — most of them satellite-fed translators — in locations from coast to coast. Parrish left the company in 2001, but continued to work for it on a contract basis into early 2002. Eventually, he parted with CSN altogether. In time, he began thinking of using his knowledge of translators to build a broadcast enterprise of his own. When in the fall of 2002 a pastor told his congregation to “get off the dime,” that was all Parrish needed to hear.
For months before the FCC made an official announcement, it had been rumored that the commission would soon open a translator application window. On February 6, 2003, the day the FCC announced it would solicit applications that March, Parrish completed work on software designed to find open frequencies on which to place translators, which he’d been developing for months. On his computer, he could see the untapped possibilities spread out before him. Working with a small staff of radio engineers, Parrish spent the next month feverishly preparing for the auction. Many other broadcasters of varying size were no doubt doing the same. When the window opened on March 10, the FCC was deluged with more than 13,000 applications, close to four times the number of translators that were then in operation nationwide. Some broadcasters, Christian networks primarily, such as CSN and the affiliated Calvary Chapel of Twin Falls, filed for hundreds of translators. Parrish’s Radio Assist Ministry and a second nonprofit, Edgewater Broadcasting, which one of his business partners, Earl Williamson, incorporated a day after the filing window opened, applied for more than 4,000 — less than half the number the companies had been prepared to file for. The influx caught the FCC’s media bureau, which processes the applications, by surprise. Peter Doyle, the chief of the bureau’s audio division, told me that the commission had placed no cap on how many translators one company — or two commonly owned firms — could own, and thus apply for. Nor did the commission require that a company prove it had the available capital to make good on its promise to provide programming. (According to their 2003 business filings, Radio Assist and Edgewater had a combined $38 in net assets and more than $380,000 in liabilities.) Nor, evidently, was the FCC particularly troubled when Parrish’s companies began selling translator permits, which it had granted free, mostly to other Christian broadcasters, in deals ranging from $2,000 to more than $200,000 that began as early as July 2003.
If Parrish’s dealings were of no concern to the FCC, they riled advocates of community radio, such as the Prometheus Radio Project, which had pushed throughout the late 1990s for the commission to create a low-power FM (LPFM) radio service that would help to diversify the airwaves, acting as a counterweight to a consolidated media landscape. Though the commission eventually started an LPFM service in 2000 — it has licensed nearly 700 low-power stations, each of which has a broadcast radius of three and a half miles — the advocates now saw themselves locked in a battle for spectrum with companies like Parrish’s. If Parrish and others succeeded in placing translators across the nation, would there be any room left on the dial for community radio? Among LPFM supporters, the spectrum grab became known as the “Great Translator Invasion.” In their eyes, Clark Parrish, whom they accused of trafficking in spectrum, was seen as something like the Genghis Khan of the translator conquest.
Indeed, Parrish and his two partners, Earl Williamson and Diana Atkin, who collectively sit on the boards of the nonprofits, as well as the for-profit engineering firm World Radio Link, have few defenders. Even Byron St. Clair, the president of the National Translator Association, an industry organization that represents the interests of translator operators, was critical of Parrish’s companies, which he said had filed “clearly speculative applications.” “No question in my mind. As soon as they get a [construction permit] they’re out there trying to sell it.” Nor does Parrish have an ally in the National Religious Broadcasters, a powerful industry association that lobbies on behalf of Christian broadcasters. “The idea of him brokering these things seems to be beyond the pale,” the association’s president, Frank Wright, told USA Today last spring. In February 2005 in Anaheim at the organization’s annual convention, World Radio Link actively marketed translators on behalf of Edgewater and Radio Assist. It billed itself in the convention’s newsletter as the representative of “the two largest filers of FM translator applications in the FCC’s most recent FM filing window,” and said that the companies “are making available for acquisition hundreds of these FM translator station construction permits to existing or new entrant Christian broadcasters throughout the country.”
Gloria Tristani, the former FCC commissioner who is now the managing director of the United Church of Christ’s office of communication, told me that Parrish’s companies appear to have broken the spirit if not the letter of the commission’s rules. “A lot of the applications were hoarded by particular companies who were using them to go beyond the repeating of a local signal, using them to create networks,” she said. “And that’s not what translators were intended for.” I asked her whether, in her estimation, the companies were engaging in routine commerce or, rather, spectrum trafficking. “It certainly appears that way,” she said of the latter possibility.
In March 2005, in the days before Michael Powell stepped down as FCC chairman, a coalition of LPFM advocates that included Prometheus, the Media Access Project, and the United Church of Christ filed an emergency petition with the FCC to halt the processing of translator applications. The brief centered on Parrish’s companies, which the petitioners accused of fraud, trafficking, and deriving “unjust enrichment” at the public’s expense. “Allowing the sale of naked construction permits in the broadcast services is contrary to the public interest and corrupts the integrity of the Commission’s processes,” the petition stated. But it left open the question of whether the firms broke any regulations: “It is possible that no individual transaction violated any specific rule governing either the application process or the sale of FM translators.” It argued, however, that the commission is required to take action under the 1934 Communications Act (amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996) in instances where an applicant’s actions, taken as a whole, make plain it “intended from the beginning to speculate in Commission licenses rather than provide service.”
In one of his final actions as chairman, Powell, along with his fellow commissioners, froze the grant of pending translator licenses while the commission considered their impact on LPFM and solicited public comment. Since then, comments have poured in from individuals, industry organizations, and public and private broadcasters, filling FCC docket 99-25, which now holds more than 16,000 filings.
The application freeze, however, had little impact on Edgewater Broadcasting or Radio Assist Ministry. When it took effect, the FCC had already granted the companies more than 1,000 translator permits in locations across the country, of which the firms have since sold, traded, optioned, or donated more than 130.
Parrish’s companies have also inspired congressional legislation, introduced in September by Representative Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat. If passed, the Enhance and Protect Local Community Radio Act would place a cap on ownership of translators and impose restrictions on how they are sold and transferred. The legislation, which clearly alludes to Edgewater and Radio Assist, would also seek to revoke translator licenses that have created “unjust enrichment” and those that would not “serve the public interest.”
In many ways, it is beyond remarkable that one man in Twin Falls, Idaho, who felt called upon by God, set these events in motion. It’s equally impressive that his companies, which reported a combined $38 in net assets in 2003, have so quickly laid the groundwork for a small powerhouse of a Christian network. Based on the average sale price for one of their translators, their remaining spectrum holdings, which the FCC granted free, could be worth as much as $8.7 million.
Bisected by a wide thoroughfare, an expanse of strip malls, chain restaurants, and motels running in either direction, Twin Falls is a sleepy city of 34,000 at the foot of southern Idaho’s Snake River Valley. When I visited in late November, World Radio Link, also home to Edgewater Broadcasting and Radio Assist Ministry, was headquartered in a two-story office park just off Blue Lakes Boulevard, the city’s main drag. (In early December, the companies moved to new offices across town.) Several miles from here, down the same road, the Calvary Chapel of Twin Falls, the nerve center of CSN, is housed in a squat, pre-fab building surrounded by tracts of farmland. An antenna, with a small satellite dish fixed below, sprouts from its roof. No fewer than eight large dishes point skyward in a lot behind the church; two more are attached to the left side of the building.
One morning, Parrish welcomed me to World Radio Link’s spartan office suite. Tall, with medium-length gray-white hair and a neatly trimmed beard, Parrish is an earnest and friendly man of forty-eight who laughs hard and often. In person, the mastermind of the Great Translator Invasion seems nothing like the diabolical character some of his critics make him out to be.
In some ways, Parrish is baffled that his companies have received so much attention. In others he saw it coming. “We did something really big,” he said simply, seated behind a large wooden desk, not hiding a look of satisfaction. Nor does he mask his distress that some have labeled him, quite publicly, a crook.
He wondered whether part of the reason his companies have drawn so much ire is political. “It was commonly thought that radio played a big role in the last presidential election and conservative radio seemed to have the edge. Did that play into it? Do we not like the programming, is that part of the issue?” He went on, “Translators have been primarily implemented by Christian broadcasters. Maybe there’s a problem with that.” Parrish’s detractors would strenuously disagree that their position is in any way political, but there is no doubt that liberals in general find the nexus of Christian broadcasting and right-wing politics threatening, particularly since hot-button moral issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and stem-cell research proved decisive (and divisive) during the 2004 election. In the age of Terry Schiavo, intelligent design, and faith-based initiatives, and under an administration led by a deeply religious president who has said that he felt called upon by God to run for office, politics and religion are increasingly inseparable. To those who oppose the ideology of the religious Right, the notion that an aspiring Christian broadcaster with some know-how and a modest investment can spread the “good news” to a sizable public must be unsettling, to say the least.
From his desk drawer, Parrish pulled a color-coded map of the U.S., an engineering study depicting free spectrum around the country, along with areas that have been claimed by translators. The map showed an abundance of open spectrum — that is, available radio frequencies on which to transmit a signal — though translators had clustered in desirable locations, near densely populated areas. “There are lots of channels to choose from,” Parrish said. “Is it that we’re blocking them [LPFMs] from having channels? I don’t see that, but I think it’s certainly been represented that way.” (Doyle, of the FCC’s media bureau, agreed that the issue has been misrepresented by some LPFM advocates. “You can often put translators in places where you cannot put low-power stations. So Prometheus is fundamentally, and frankly, outrageously wrong when it has claimed that every translator bumps out a potential low-power station.” That said, he continued, “Common sense tells you that given the enormous number [of translator applications], there has to be some preclusive impact. Maybe it’s a lot, maybe it’s not much.”)
Parrish told me that from the beginning his intention, in creating a radio network, has been to “make a difference in people’s lives” through Christian programming. To build a network from scratch, he and his partners crafted a novel strategy. “We didn’t let this out of the bag to begin with,” he told me, “but our plan was always a cart before the horse kind of thing. Get the translators, get them on the air however you can, then come back and provide the full-power stations. We call them the horses.” When the translator filing window opened, he said, “I was probably the translator king. I’d been doing this for ten years, and I knew everything there was to know about translators. That’s what made this possible.”
Their business plan evolved over time, and selling and trading (and even donating) some of the translator permits they acquired from the FCC eventually figured into their strategy. This served two purposes. One, it provided revenue to finance — at least in part — a network build-out, as well as the bargaining chips with which to trade other networks for FM stations — the proverbial “horses” to power their translators. It also allowed the companies to help other Christian organizations reach out through radio, which Parrish had always seen as central to their mission. To date, the companies have earned as much as $52,500 for a single translator and sold others for as little as $2,000. All told, they have entered into more than $900,000 in spectrum deals.
Given that Radio Assist and Edgewater have accomplished this using free public spectrum, it’s easy to see why some might allege impropriety, though one might just as easily accuse Parrish of being an exceedingly clever businessman. As Parrish pointed out, the companies are nonprofits, from which neither he nor his partners derive salaries — so financial gain is clearly not his motive. “I certainly have done nothing illegal,” he said. It seems, in fact, that the companies have followed the rules, loose as they are, fastidiously. In conversations with several FCC officials, none suggested that Parrish’s companies had strayed from the commission’s regulations in obtaining or brokering translators, though two officials wondered, in retrospect, whether granting so much spectrum to the companies was the best use of public airwaves.
“It’s of concern to us, because in many ways these translators are not providing the type of local programming we really think the airwaves should be used for,” an FCC official told me, requesting anonymity because the commission has yet to weigh in on this matter. “In certain instances, there’s not such a public-interest benefit.”
Parrish, for his part, made two trips to Washington, D.C., last spring, after the translator freeze, to plead his case to various FCC officials. He said one commissioner assured him that the commission would not rescind any of the translator licenses it had already granted. He was also told that he was perfectly within his rights to sell some of his holdings. The FCC’s actions since then appear to bear this out, since the commission, which reviews sale and transfer agreements, has continued to green-light the deals, even while pending translator applications remain in limbo. Taking their cue from the FCC, Edgewater and Radio Assist have continued to sell translators, entering into deals worth close to $100,000 last fall.
The FCC official acknowledged that the agency must “refine” its regulations, placing limits on translator ownership and restrictions on sales. “You have situations where individuals have received them, then they’ve gone to the secondary market just to sell them off,” he said. “And that thwarts the entire purpose.” At some point, the FCC will sort through those questions, but the time frame for that is up to the commission’s new chairman, Kevin Martin, the official said.
As for Representative Slaughter’s legislation, which could disrupt Parrish’s plans, it seems unlikely at this point even to come to a vote. The legislation has yet to find a Republican cosponsor, which, in a highly partisan Congress, means it could languish, according to her spokesman.
Meanwhile, Radio Assist and Edgewater are pushing forward, building their network in stages. In a series of sometimes complex deals that involved payments in both cash and translators, the companies have so far obtained five FM stations. One of them, in Markleysburg, Pennsylvania, recently went on the air. It will rebroadcast a local Christian station until Parrish’s companies develop original programming, a task they’re only just beginning. They’re now completing construction on a radio studio in their new offices, and the city of Twin Falls has granted the companies a permit to install a satellite uplink. Things are starting to take shape.
Thinking about what lies ahead — outfitting and programming what could be a formidable Christian network — Parrish sighed heavily. “I woke up this morning and I was thinking this very thing, how are we going to get this done? God help me. Everyway we can.”
Daniel Schulman is an assistant editor at CJR. CJR gratefully acknowledges support for this article from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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