You’ve surely heard of the wall of separation between Church and State. Bott Radio has a different wall – it’s the wall between Profit and Non-Profit.
Back in the early days of radio, many battles were fought to create what today is the system of Non-Commercial Educational FM stations. The area of the FM band below 92 MHz is set aside for Religious, Educational and Community non-profit radio stations.
Bott Radio operates a network for about 35 radio stations and a network for FM translators, mostly in the Great Plains area of middle America. They air 24 hour a day Bible based Christian teaching ministries. Most of their FM stations are in the NCE portion of the FM band, so you might conclude they are a non-profit religious broadcaster. You would be mistaken. I was.
Bott Broadcasting was founded by Dick Bott, who packed up a Uhaul and took the profits he made in the radio business in California and moved to Middle America to buy a radio station in the Kansas City area and preach the message of Jesus to Middle America – but Bott Broadcasting is a for profit corporation. It is not a charity, does not solicit donations, and accepts sponsorships. The NCE stations are kept inside a separate corporation controlled by the Bott Family which carries the same programming as the AM stations and commercial FM stations.
Walking this fine line for-profit and non-profit creates interesting problems. Non-Profit organizations are not allowed to be blatantly partisan, although they can discuss issues (like abortion), as long as they don’t say “Vote for “X” because they are pro-life”.
On the other hand, for-profit radio stations are required to accept political ads. In 2008, Candidate Obama wanted to run advertisements on the Bott Radio Network, and being commercial stations, they were required to accept them despite being strongly opposed to his political positions. So they ended up accepting the advertisements, and then contributing all the revenue to pro-life charities and pregnancy crisis centers and making it clear they did not agree with his stands on moral and religious issues.
If you would like to read more, the company profile is lcoated [here]