Reclaiming radio: alternative radio projects attempt to take back the public sphere.(FEATURE)

A MOTHER'S VOICE stretched over the air to a son spending the holidays in a Virginia prison: "Keep your head up. I love you. Just do what you gotta do to survive."

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The hushed message was one of dozens featured on Calls from Home, a project of Mountain Community Radio in Kentucky. Each December, the call-in program helps families of prisoners reconnect through holiday shout-outs, aired on stations across the country.

Since the first mass broadcasts crackled over the country's airwaves in the 1920s, radio has defined itself as a democratic medium, providing communities that have few resources--from inmates to immigrant workers--a conduit for news and civic communication.

But today, media activists say commercialism has reduced a vital institution to an industry of white noise. In response, alternative radio projects and media-justice movements have emerged to resuscitate a flagging public sphere.

Jammed with shock jocks, manufactured gangstas and formulaic news bites, the FM dial allows scant room for critical thought. Activists say that's no accident. The broadcast industry has become heavily consolidated and commercialized since the 1990s, thanks to the dismantling of federal regulations on corporate ownership. Those trends, critics argue, have systematically silenced the voices of women, people of color, youth and other under-represented communities in the public sphere.

It wasn't always this way. A generation ago, radio was fueling activism in Black communities nationwide.