10/02/2025
The airwaves, once a vibrant tapestry of localized voices, have become an echo chamber. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, an ostensibly benign deregulation effort, unleashed a corporate feeding frenzy that fundamentally restructured the American radio landscape. By relaxing ownership limits, the Act allowed giants like iHeartMedia, Audacy, and Cumulus Media to consolidate thousands of stations, effectively transforming local public-service broadcasting into a national, homogenized profit machine. This tectonic shift has generated an intense and existential conflict with the remnants of independent, community-focused radio—particularly the Black radio stations dedicated to serving the African Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) community, exemplified by the mission of stations like WZKD and its sister frequencies, owned by Roscoe Miller and his cohort across central and southern Alabama.