Foreword by Robert W. McChesney
Microradio and Democracy discusses the role of citizen access to communications in a democratic society, and how diversity, localism, and core political speech are undermined by corporate control of the public airwaves. Greg Ruggiero examines the emergence of the microradio activism and recent court cases, and the links between the microradio struggle and larger movements for democracy and social justice. Illustrated with photos and graphics, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about keeping free speech for communities, not corporations.
Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, in February 2002 Ruggiero won a First Amendment victory in Federal District Court. The case, Ruggiero vs the FCC proved that the U.S. government's lifetime prohibition against individuals who had engaged in civil disobedience from applying for a low-power FM license was unconstitutional. The victory was later overturned by an en banc decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected to hear the case.
Editor Greg Ruggiero returns to Seven Stories Press
Greg Ruggiero, one of America’s top editors of leftist nonfiction, returned in November 2023 to Seven Stories Press, where he began his career in book publishing.
Ruggiero started out as a pamphleteer, hawking works by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky from street corners with his cohort Stuart Sahulka. Together, they founded Open Magazine and, in 1991, the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, publishing, among many others, Edward Said, Loretta Ross, Manning Marable, Mike Davis, Thomas Frank, The United Nations, and the Dalai Lama.
In 1998, he partnered with Seven Stories Press to create the Open Media series, which pioneered a new kind of political pamphlet in book form, most notably Noam Chomsky’s 9-11 and Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, but also works from less well-known authors, such as Tanya Reinhardt's Israel/Palestine.
Ruggiero was also co-editor, with Juana Ponce de Leon, of Our Word Is Our Weapon, the collected writings of Subcommandante Marcos, released in 2000. While in Chiapas, Mexico, working on that book, he was detained and interrogated, and given a week to leave the country.
In 2005, he left Seven Stories, moving to City Lights in early 2006. At City Lights his notable publications include The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane, and a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with lecture notes by Angela Davis. After 17 years, Ruggiero left City Lights in 2023.
His first acquisition for Seven Stories was MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within, which hit regional and national bestseller lists in its first week of sales in February 2024. Subsequent acquisitions include Talking About Abolition by Sonali Kolhatkar (January 2025), Reversing the Pipeline: Black Boarding Schools and Mass Incarceration by Tamar Sarai, Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth by Stan Cox, Todd Miller’s Dammed: Climate Change, Borders, and the Emerging Water Wars, and From Gaza to Paradise by Ramzy Baroud.
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For further information:
Ruth Weiner
Seven Stories Press
914-309-8570
ruth@sevenstories.com
GREG RUGGIERO co-founded the Open Media Series in 1991, which has since published some of the most outspoken scholars, social justice advocates, and dissidents of our time, including Angela Y. Davis, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, Arundhati Roy, and Subcomandante Marcos.
A longtime media analyst and critic of capitalism, Robert McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002, he co-founded the Free Press, a media reform organization, and acted as its president until 2008. McChesney lives in Illinois.
