our favorite show and we are have a really special incredible guest here tonight my favorite people a celebrity we have a celebrity and it's ursula rutenberg is here on the show we are very pleased to to have you on the show s community radio or soul community radio is when common folks regular folks like us get together and we have a radio station and we help run the radio station and we host the shows and we operate the station and we're completely responsible so it's community access to mass media when you're i was following you all the way up until you said responsibly yeah yeah well that's i don't know that i could that's usually where a lot of people drop off yeah in fact you know i think i've got a so why well you know it's one of the cool things about community radio is that it's a big project it's a big enterprise it's a big undertaking and in return you get a big reward you get at the seat of the table in the media world so  it's like many other projects that community people get involved with volunteering for one of the differences is that the level of the enterprise is very very ambitious and the rewards are incredible nothing is finer than a radio station i mean it is so much fun when did you first get involved in  well you know i grew up in ames where w o i was a local radio station and local t v station and so i grew up accustomed to the idea that we had our own local station we were all very proud of w i and  then when i moved to los angeles when i was in my early twenty's i went to college in los angeles and i stumbled across k p f k which was pursued the pacifica station in los angeles and they sounded totally crazy to me they didn't sound anything like radio they sounded like a whole different sound and i thought it was weird and intriguing and so i started listening and the thing that really turned me around was one day well they did a lot of things that were pretty wild but one day they said well you know this thing has happened in washington d c at the watergate hotel and we know something really important has happened there the government has done something really bad we don't know exactly what it is but stay tuned we're going to try and find out and i thought to myself ok these guys they are like just have been chilly paranoid you know they they just like always want to see conspiracies and then you know a year later the water great bit what a gate story broke and that was kind of the turning point when for me when i realized that community media was where you get the hear things first so in that instance people were saying no there's no such thing going on in the water you guys are making stuff up  here blue a law you guys are so is that what the people were saying exactly people always said you're crazy and you know without throughout so that's when i really got hooked and ice i heard fabulous things i remember when the you know pacifica radio was really the media that broke the vietnam story they went illegally to north vietnam and started covering the other side of the story during the vietnam war and that's what triggered this whole media frenzy that ended up having a big influence on the war so throughout the years you know people will end up saying to me things like how did you know that you know things will happen or all know things and i think i i don't know why i know that and then i go oh it's because i listen the community radio but isn't the point or the media to tell you what to  not one view that you know that's all you all you need when i think of media isn't it all about indoctrination well let me introduce you to the first amendment oh our forefathers in all we that congress shall not tell people what to say in the media in so many words and that it's a basic tenet of our democracy and in fact the community radio movement plays an enormous role all over the world outside the united states  media in democracy movements and we in the united states we are very lucky we have the first amendment which guarantees the free press we also have access to the airwaves we have we are entitled as citizens to get airwaves and we even have a protected part of the dial which protects noncommercial radio these are nothing many countries don't have this and many people around the world are dying for this right alone we have no idea how complacent we are because people before us foresaw these the importance of these liberties and these rights and they insured them and you would be amazed at how many people in other countries are putting their life the line just to have what we have everybody back we're back and earthward beggar's here talking to us about community radio now don't you feel i guess that some idea like it's important for people to be able to talk to the radio or is that dangerous to me don't people feel like why we can't just let have the public access to the radio airwaves because then they'll say things well not only should you talk to the radio the radio should listen to you be a reflection of the people or do you just turn it off so it doesn't talk back yes but people get you know once you start listening community radio people tend to buy lots of radio so that it's in every room with their house because they want to hear it wherever they are because you never know what people are going to say and community radio you're hearing your neighbors say i personally believe that a life lived without being on the radio and hearing and knowing the people that i hear on the radio is not a life worth living we're greedy and and that's why we want to you because we hear you on the radio and i hear you on the radio and all should be aware living as it was like yes people should be able to communicate with each other that community radio is the a lot of vision and really brave acts have made up this tradition of community based media and the desire to broadcast which is you know to sit like what we're doing to sit in front of a microphone and speak to the world at large to use microphones and media as a form of mass communication that was not created by the people who created the technology the military basically was responsible for developing radio technology to the point that it got but they were using it as kind of a walkie talkie system a point to point you know i'm here where you type of thing and it was really the common citizens of the world like us who finally realized oh my goodness we can use this to create a virtual town square and that a micro you know the macro magnetic wavelengths they can really be serving our communication so at heart you know it's a grand tradition of people who love communication who understand that this is really a basic part of what it is to be human what makes what makes radio different from other media why is radio special radio is the theatre of the mind meaning that it's not like when you watch t because when you watch t v you're being fed an image and a complete experience so you kind of click into i think what they call the alpha state you kind of become a passive receptor but in radio you hear things and your mind builds images so radio is actually called a visual medium because it provokes people to see things in their mind so it's a whole different way of engaging where you really are encouraged to build your inner vision and that's what makes it such a powerful medium so in all your days of community radio listening to do you have like special incredibly favorite moments of of things that happened that said oh man this could not have happened any other way that on community media yeah i'll tell you one thing that i heard that was just so incredible in the one nine hundred ninety s i think or the i can remember when it was now the united states bombed  the after the bombing of belgrade there was there was a a community radio station in belgrade and they were constantly at war with milosevic he was constantly trying to shut them down and they were kind of a pirate station and  after the bombing of belgrade my community radio station in new york city where i was living set up a simultaneous simultaneous broadcast with the community radio in belgrade where they conducted at to our war with each other using cartoon noises as weapons and so you know you had like a what he would do packard you know countered by fred flintstone and this went on for two hours and at the end of it the united states diplomatic implications of it were overwhelming you know in terms of people reaching each other so there's many many instances like that that just you know when you have moments like that you just you get hooked  is it given given this power what puzzles me is why is that it's so hard to get people to support their community stations well first of all in many communities it's not that difficult in many communicating communities there's huge support for the station i think where we are right now in ames iowa people aren't accustomed to it and so it's it's almost kind of like more than people expect and so they kind of don't know how to react to it that's my impression is that the comprehension hasn't really hit that this really is what it is but let's face it we live in a country that doesn't have a real business model for these type of enterprises we live in a capitalist society where business as usual doesn't include you know community based nonprofit enterprises that's kind of the reality of a lot of nonprofit organizations there is really no business model for it and it's that the thing is that this when pacifica was created in one thousand nine hundred forty nine it became the prototype for an established you know legal  radio station that wasn't a college station and they created the concept of listener sponsorship which now n p r uses and p b s and everybody uses and all community radio that model worked really really well until  thousand and four with the economic change i remember in new york city when our station would do a fun drive they would make more than a million each you know every to eat you know every day for two weeks they would make sixty thousand six hundred thousand an hour sometimes  today that's it it's a different world that excess money just isn't there so we're living today in a culture that doesn't have excess money floating around you know money has become more and more divided between the rich and the poor so that middle  class relaxed atmosphere isn't there and there's no big business model for that so you know for forty fifty years community radio did really really well on listener sponsorship now that model is breaking down and there is no answer let's hear a song well happiness is not about money money it's about important things isn't it doug indication is happiness is communication is happiness but money that's something else money is well you know what i always say money is carbon carbon fuel that's what really our money is about that's another you go beyond that you say that you know people are well no no i am a petroleum product yes that's what we say that they're looking like it to yes thank you  i have one more question but by the way you got you guys look really sharp thank you thank you very much wanted to dress to impress yeah yeah that's that's what we do here on the tom dart show so there's this thing called pacific and what is pacifica for people don't know what it is it's a it's a it's a network it's a bunch of little stations it's a movement what the heck is it a pacifica is one of the main prototypes for community radio it's i can't really say it's the founder of community radio because community radio is kind of a natural impulse that people do anyway but in one nine hundred thirty s in the one nine hundred thirty s what happened was that radio was still a relatively new medium and then all the sudden people realised goodness gracious we could make a lot of money from this and so the commercial world began very quickly to take over the radio in fact the whole am dial was taken up by commercial stations who really where you know commercials became it became unclear whether the radio was for the commercials or the commercials or for the radio and so in in the late one nine hundred thirty s and mid one nine hundred forty s there was this group of conscientious objectors who kind of developed out of the pacifist movement during world war two and they decided they were all in this prison camp together because they didn't want to go to war and they decided to open up a radio station with the express purpose of communication because they thought it would further peace so when the war ended they ended up having to go to the f m dial because there was no space on the amdo and they started to station in berkeley california called k p a fake which became the prototype for today's community radio stations and it was a free speech station basically the basic idea was that great ideas and vision comes through individuals when they are allowed to express their personal vision of crazy job and that it's a crazy time and so the idea was you have to create a place where people are encouraged and safe to just genuinely express their individuality because that's where great ideas came from and that was the beginning of k p f a the now i have to say simultaneously the same idea was occurring in south america in peru where a bunch of miners were on strike coal miners and while they were on strike they wanted to communicate with each other and they they had the same bright ideas like oh we can use radio to do that so the beginning that they are the kind of official beginning of communicate community radio is attributed to those two point two sources however people have been getting on the radio and talking to each other independent of that ever since radio is was created and so anyway pacifica the idea grew very quickly and then they ended up getting stations donated to them from los angeles as well as berkeley and then came u was and then came new york city and in then washington d c so pacifica now is a regular nonprofit organization like any other one but it owns radio frequencies in five major metropolitan areas so it became a significant media presence because of that it also became a significant media presence because it became the place where stories could get broken because it was uncensored and so you had a lot of reporters who were trying to go to the commercial media are going to even n p r could get their stories on because it was you know there was a to boo against it and so they would go to pacific and the story would get broken there and then that would then force the rest of the media to deal with the story because the story had been broken so even though it was a small organization it played a pivotal role in the history of the united states media and they were called before the house of un american activities because they were the only media that really covered freedom summer the during the civil rights movement when they were registering black people to vote so they've all was so we have an incredible archive of american grassroots history at pacifica where because they recorded all of the grassroots movements in this country so it's an institution that has stood for citizen radio ship it stood for the great thinkers of our time and now where i come in is and that's the organization i fell in love with and i never dreamed that i would work for them i was just a listener but in the around two thousand and one i ended up being their affiliate coordinator because there are actually radio stations all over the country that either emulate pacifica or want to associated with it because of the access to programming infrastructure so i became the person who built an affiliate network there was one prior to that but it had collapsed and so together with the input from many many radio stations around the country i began building an affiliate network which now consists of about two hundred community radio stations mostly in the united states we have a few in canada we have some in europe a few in africa but  it's a network of community radio stations so we share programming and we share we help each other you know it's a it's a movement as well as a professional world and i have to say i think that i work with the best people in the united states big big your hero your hero for the audio port because they are the open is the thing that seems to have you know connected all of these stations can you talk about their well when i started my job in two thousand and three there was there were a lot of problems because of things that happened prior to me so i spent a lot of time being yelled at by people who were the we can do other you know i listen i live and so one of the things that they were complaining i didn't really read the fine print or the large print but so anyway so first pacifica used n p r satellite we rented space then we got our own satellite it doesn't belong to us but we rented space on  satellite and and so a lot of other community radio stations would not only take programs from the satellite they would ask you know they would ask to be able to use it to distribute programs because they started to distribute really good programs themselves and  and the thing about a satellite is that it has a schedule there's only so many hours in the day and the satellite depends on time on real time and so by the time mike arrived on the scene there were a lot of complaints people were saying we want access to distribution technology and we can't get up on your satellite and so i was at a radio conference in los angeles in fact the iraqi war invasion had just begun that day and i was sitting in a bar with an if philly it director and he was norm stockwell from w o r t in madison wisconsin and he said to me he took out a napkin a bar napkin and he made a little diagram on it he said or so this is what you need to do you need to build a website that will allow everybody to upload their content and to download the content so that there are no more time space limitations and we let everybody know on the network that from now on there was no bottleneck they had a password they could upload their show into the website and instantly be distributing their programming internationally and everybody thought we were selling them something and threw the letters away so like for the first two years nothing happened because the comprehend it's kind of like you're asking you know supporting community the comprehension didn't hit people didn't realize the cage of the door had been opened there was no gate keeper anymore you know today that sounds funny because it's the way we all live now so the burning question that we get most about our show and about radio is you were saying pacifica's important partly because it's uncensored it breaks news stories other organizations don't dare to and yet there are still things we can't say on the radio what's up with that i mean i could have i could have a wardrobe malfunction right and that would be ok yeah actually radio laws are stricter than t v laws because radio scene is such a powerful medium that's the f c c pacifica actually challenge that is with the famous george carlin show where he said every dirty word he could think of on the radio and the f c c sued pacifica pacifica to go to the supreme court as a free speech issue and they begged other media groups to coming with them as a class action suit and nobody nobody would help pacifica they were left they were hung out to dry by the rest of the media world probably for good reason and they they lost their shirt they basically so that there was a wardrobe malfunction actually it was a stay it was a it was a facility malfunction as a result of that lawsuit pacifica  ended up losing so much money that they had this beautiful church in new york city which was the radio station for w b ai and they had to sell the station home and still the the church and it's been a disaster ever since the station just doesn't have a good home so yeah there was sure it wasn't lost but a building was lost and it was it was a huge price to pay and that's when the f c c established absolutely are the supreme court established absolutely that there were forbidden words on the radio and if you want to say it they will find you enough to tom and the dog and the show by