Viewpoint: ‘Emergency Communications Will Be Disrupted’ Without Access To AM Radio. | Story

With Congress considering a bill that would require automakers to keep AM radio in vehicle dashboards, following September’s bipartisan 45-2 vote by the House Energy and Commerce Committee to advance the proposed AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act (H.R. 8449), American Consumer Institute/Inside Sources Policy Analyst Nate Scherer has weighed in on the bill’s importance.

The numbers are certainly on AM’s side, as Scherer cites research showing more than 80 million Americans tune into 4,000 AM radio stations monthly for informational updates on sports, spiritual programming, and traffic and weather reports.

“Policymakers should consider the many benefits AM radio provides for nontraditional consumers in hard-to-reach parts of the country,” Scherer writes in a guest column for the Boston Herald. “Due to its low frequency and general reliability, AM radio is the perfect medium for federal, state, and local government officials to deliver critical safety information to the public in real-time. However, as some automakers roll back AM radio availability, access to this information will suffer, and consumer safety will be at risk.”

Noting that severe storms and wildfires regularly take out power and phone service, making it difficult for residents to get information about threats or emergency relief, Scherer says, “If that critical information access pipeline deteriorates, efficient emergency communication relays will be disrupted. AMBER alerts and weather-related emergency communications may go unnoticed until it is too late.”

Scherer also points out how crucial AM’s existence is to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Alert System, an argument made via letters in support of H.R. 8449 from seven top former FEMA officials.

“It is not only the nation’s emergency response system that will suffer if AM radio is phased out,” Scherer writes, citing a survey finding that 81% of agricultural workers use AM/FM radio to receive updates on agriculture news, market trends and weather news patterns. “Rural Americans, linguistic minorities, and other groups will suffer because they depend on AM radio to access content tailored to their needs. The reality is that AM radio provides highly valued, essential information to Americans, [and] many underserved communities continue to rely on AM radio as a go-to source of information that is not easily replaceable.”

Answering those calling AM “a dying medium primarily used by older Americans to access conservative talk radio,” where “attempts to save it could unintentionally invite government overreach into the private sector, and prove overly burdensome to automakers,” Scherer argues that “Those concerns are understandable, but do not outweigh AM radio’s many positive benefits.”

Likewise, in response to electric vehicle manufacturers such as Tesla and Volvo, which have objected to the bill, noting that AM broadcast signals cause electromagnetic interference in battery-powered motors, Scherer says, “This problem can be mitigated by simply using protective shielding for cables, filters, active noise cancelation, or the strategic placement of parts, to overcome this obstacle,” while pointing out that automakers such as Ford have committed to continue equipping future models with AM radio.