culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

FREDERIK STIERNSTEDT, LINUS ANDERSSON
landscape that seemed to swallow and dissipate every attack. Power was still
recognized as the public service monopoly, which led to tighter alliances
between radio pirates and commercial interests.
The community radio was not made permanent until 1985, six years of
testing period was over. And the mid 1980s also meant a higher level of
broadcasting. This development intersects with political and economic and not
least ideological change on the media landscapes of Europe. The de-regulation
policies, in the aftermath of neo-liberalism and Thatcherism, struck European
media monopolies. Strong Swedish interest groups as Swedish Association for
Trade and Industry conjoined with large media groups such as the Swedish
MTG (Kinnevik) started to get their interest up for commercial radio (and
television). An intense period of lobbying began, resulting in a number of
publications in the interest of ‘free’ (read commercialized) radio and television.
In this lobbying political arguments were used when propagating for a free radio.
In a report from The Swedish Association for Trade and Industry called Free
Radio in a Sweden with Free Media [Fri radio i ett Sverige med fria medier]
(Näringslivets mediainstitut rapport nr 4, 1991), examples of how a free radio
supports a democratic development and social change were drawn from
Czechoslovakia, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Guatemala and South Africa. These
cases were supposed to show (through guilt by association) how freedom of
speech was obliged to expand to encompass also broadcast media. The struggle
for a commercial radio in Sweden was hence fought with arguments of freedom
of expression and democracy.
In 1987 the Swedish media corporation MTG started semi-illegal satellite
television broadcasting over Sweden from London based studios (a kind of
space-age off-shore pirating). The community radio got a boom through the
Swedish Association for Trade and Industry financed Radio City, broadcasting
over the major cities in Sweden through community radio.
Another important example here was Radio Nova – a community radio
station owned by a coalition of organizations (non-profit as well as political
parties) – that broadcasted commercials to its approximated 200 000 listeners in
the early 1990s, an activity that generated three legal processes and made Radio
Nova an international beacon for supporters of ‘free’ radio. Interesting to note
here is how the character of illegal activities has changed from the 1960s and
1970s until the 1980s/1990s: from breaking the law because of an ambition to
develop the youth culture or ‘make Sweden freakier” to breaking the law by
transmitting advertisements. In one way this could be interpreted as a loss of
idealism within alternative radio (the journalist ideal becomes colonized by
commercial interests), still, on the other hand, this follows the logical
consequences of the legal developments surrounding pirate radio. If contesting
media power is at the heart of pirate radios objectives, then this contestation will
find different expressions as long as there is an actual power to challenge or
resist. With the textual co-optation and remodeling of public service radio in the
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