Origin Story: Making Contact | 30th Anniversary Capsule - Making Contact | Radio Show and Podcast

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Posted on Jan 28, 2026

Over a dark blue textured background with a gold border, a large shiny gold balloon saying “30”. (Graphic by Lissa Deonarain)

From its birthplace in an Oakland cafe in 1994 to the Battle in Seattle, international reporting projects, and a deep commitment to social justice journalism, Making Contact has been an important part of the media landscape for more than thirty years. Guest host Jessica Partnow guides us through some of the key moments in Making Contact’s history in conversation with founders Peggy Law and Norman Solomon.

This episode is part of the Making Contact Anniversary Capsule: celebrating 30 years of social justice journalism. The miniseries takes us from protests on the streets of Seattle to an Indiana family fighting for their daughter’s gender affirming care. It explores a racial reckoning in the world of romance writers, and tells the story of border walls from Gaza to Arizona. These shows embody how Making Contact has been digging into the story beneath the story since 1994.

Featuring:

Peggy Law, Founder
Norman Solomon, Founder
Jeff Emtman, Audio Engineer

Music:

“Bullethead,” Charlie Hunter Trio

Credits

Making Contact Team

Guest Host: Jessica Partnow
Executive Director: Jina Chung
Editor: Adwoa Gyimah Brempong
Engineer: Jeff Emtman
Digital Media Marketing: Lissa Deonarain

TRANSCRIPT

Button: Making, making, making contact. Making contact.

Jessica Partnow: This week on Making Contact. We’re taking a look back at the 30 year history of this show.

Philip Abbot: Welcome to Making Contact an international radio program, seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information.

Jessica Partnow: I’m your guest host Jessica Partnow, and I’m so honored to get this chance to look back over three decades of social justice journalism. For just about everyone who’s working on the show today, making contact has been around for longer than we’ve been in journalism.

Our engineer, Jeff told me that Making Contact was actually one of his inspirations to get into radio in the first place. He can remember being 20 years old, running a Pacifica station in Bellingham and burning a CD of the show every week.

Jeff Emtman: Jessica, it was actually one of my first jobs that I ever had.

And I had this little windowless office that I shared with an ancient AP wire computer and a mini disc player, and this big stack of re writeable CDs that I’d burn the news onto. And each week I’d wait very impatiently for the new Making Contact episode to get posted and I’d download all the files and I’d write them at like one X speed to this old cd.

And when it was done, it would pop out of the computer and I’d run it in my socks down this long carpeted hallway to the studio. Sometimes just moments before the show was going to air and after I dropped off the cd, I’d wait back out in the hallway hoping that when the DJ hit play that I’d hear this exact music.

And I know it sounds weird, but nearly 20 years later, hearing this music gives me such a feeling of excitement and relief because it means that that scratched old CDRW lived to see another week’s episode of Making Contact. And it meant that the people in my city were hearing the news.

Jessica Partnow: I think I first started hearing about making contact around the time of the WTO protests in Seattle, my hometown in 1999.

Making Contact is movement journalism. That’s something that has become increasingly popular in recent years, but this organization has been doing it since so long before the rest of the media world came to understand how important it is for journalists to be deeply rooted in the communities and the movements that they cover.

Personally, I came to Making Contact in 2021. I was interim executive director for a year, and then interim senior producer for another year. And now I’m here as an occasional guest host as the show transitions into its next iteration. But before we get to what’s next, we wanna take a look back at a couple of historic moments for our show.

So let’s go back to the early days.

Norman Solomon (archive): Peggy Law is executive director.

Peggy Law: I did not even think about myself as a journalist, but I was an activist.

Norman Solomon (archive): Norman Solomon is senior advisor.

Norman Solomon: We were going against the grain because we were saying: don’t go back to sleep! There’s a Democrat in the White House, but the systemic problems remain.

Jessica Partnow: Huh? Systemic problems remaining even when a Democrat is in the White House. Interesting. But Norman is not talking about 2021. He’s talking about 1994. Bill Clinton is in his first term after 12 years of Reagan, and then George HW Bush. Making Contact is still just an idea at this point, but it’s driven by this need to hold powerful people, corporations, and institutions accountable.

Norman Solomon: The seeds of the idea really were about growing a radio program that would be national and international and deal with the politics that. Were swirling around the United States and the world really, back in the early mid 1990s. Radio was where it’s at in terms of activism, uh, progressive information, people being able to get around or supplement.

Corporate mass media, which of course then is now, but even more then was so dominant. We needed a way to communicate with each other around the country and beyond. That wasn’t filtered and distorted by corporate media, and we had to find ways to do that more effectively and in a more genuine way. And Peggy Law was really central to that process.

Peggy Law: Activism was very high in the eighties and nineties. It was during the Contra War and the death squads in El Salvador, and many activists were going down there and learning the truth and coming back and wanting to report it. But most radio stations or even some print media, we certainly wouldn’t take it.

So frustration was really, really high.

Jessica Partnow: For activists, it can be really hard to get a story placed,

Peggy Law: and we figured if we paired activists with journalists, we would be able to get the stories that really needed to be told. So I went down with Witness for Peace. We went into the contra war zone. We were, you know, not where the bombs were flying, but we even, we could even hear the small arms fire.

Uh, we had to have a road cleared, um, before we could go through it because of, uh, landmines in the road.

Jessica Partnow: The Contras were committing atrocities. Peggy and the others were horrified. They decided to approach the US Embassy in Managua

Peggy Law: said we’d been in the north and we have seen that the main targets of the Contras, which we support are school teachers and healthcare workers and cooperative leaders, and.

They said yes.

Jessica Partnow: Peggy and her group didn’t really think that the embassy would do anything. They knew the CIA was backing the Contras, but sometimes you have to find a way to get face-to-face with stuff like this. So there Peggy is at the US Embassy going, “we really know exactly what the Contras are doing… they’re murdering school teachers and healthcare workers, but because the Contras are fighting the socialist Sandinistas, we just don’t care???”

Peggy Law: I asked the question and I said, well, can you say how that’s in US policy interests? And the acting ambassador said, “uh yes, because the Sandinistas were not in our interests. They were in power, and so there everything that they do to make them popular with their people. We, we wanna wipe that out.”

Jessica Partnow: Peggy had one more meeting lined up. It was with women from a group called GOM,

Peggy Law: all of which had had a worker. A family member, a husband, a son, daughter, child killed by death squads.

They gave us a long talk about that and, uh, welcomed us. And then they said, we know that your people are in the United States. They’re good people and we know that they don’t know. Please go home and tell your people. And that was the first time I began thinking about the fact that activism really is a form of journalism.

You go and you pick up stories that are unusual. You package them in whatever way that you can to reach some greatest number of people.

Norman Solomon: When we look back at that time, the early, mid 1990s, there really weren’t a lot of national programs that filled that sort of need. And a lot of the programming came from Pacifica Radio and its network, its news programming and so forth.

And it’s hard to separate all of that from the technological issues because a lot of the community radio stations had no capacity to get anything off of the NPR satellite. They simply didn’t have the resources. Keep in mind there was a bit of a competition implicitly in trying to do a national radio program.

Radio was so important for communication in general. There was no worldwide web, even email was in its infancy. There really was a quota of left wing programs for NPR stations. A lot of them didn’t want any genuine progressive programming, and there might have been a quota of one. And so when Making Contact began to develop itself, it would’ve been possible for somebody running, really the most prominent weekly progressive program on the airwaves, Alternative Radio, it might’ve been sort of natural, if not unfortunate, for someone to say, “Hey, this is competition. We’re not gonna really want to help this to happen.” With David Barsamian, it was always the opposite.

Jessica Partnow: David Barsamian is the founder of Alternative Radio. He was a huge part of Making Contact’s origin story.

Norman Solomon: He wanted to help making contact exist and grow and thrive, and there were a lot of obstacles that he helped us to overcome technological production advice and also- crucial- liaison with radio stations because when you think about it, we started a program, we had a concept half hour every week. How are we gonna get it on the air? We didn’t have anything really to show for it. So we needed to develop relationships with station managers and program managers, whether big NPR affiliates or tiny radio stations in a community somewhere.

We had to essentially persuade them that not only should they give us a try, but they should give us a chance to be on their weekly grid, on their schedule to be on at a regular time. And David gave us so much information about who was at what station, who to talk to, who to call, how to do all of that.

That was really essential because I remember it was really exciting when we could get on eight or 10 stations on a regular basis, let alone how making contact eventually grew to well over a hundred stations.

Jessica Partnow: Making Contact was officially born in a cafe in Oakland in May of 1994. It started out as a limited series of 13 weekly programs and positioned itself in opposition to hate radio like Rush Limbaugh, which was growing at the time.

A couple years later, they formed a nonprofit and they worked to build up that network of stations. They officially broke the hundred stations mark in 1998, and by 1999, as the activist world was coming alive with plans to fight against globalization and the WTO, Making Contact was ready to launch an ambitious project.

Peggy Law: In 1999, the Battle of Seattle, the World Trade Organization, was having their meeting and so were protestors from all over the world knowing that the trade organizations were making most of the people less powerful, poorer, more hungry, and that it was only the large corporations that were winning. We, we decided to go to Seattle to do an hour a day live in Seattle on the, what was happening in the streets and what, what the trade issues were.

We knew enough and had enough experience. So at that point we were just in the right place at the right time. We did marketing all over the country and, uh, Lisa Rudman, who did the marketing for us,

Jessica Partnow: Lisa Rudman would later become executive director for Making Contact.

Peggy Law: You could imagine her trying to talk to a radio station in Arkansas about why they should care about a trade, a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.

But she did a good job and, uh, so we were going to do it for a week. Uh, an hour day live. We rented the studios at an NPR station there, and we spent lots of time with the activists on the streets, and it was a wonderful thing. We, you know, I, I remember meeting somebody from Thailand that I knew through Making Contact, but never thought I would actually meet her.

Norman Solomon (archive): From Seattle, this is World Trade Watch on day one of the WTO Summit. On today’s program,

Julie Light: trade unionists, environmentalists, and other activists from around the world gathered to protest the World Trade Organization’s ministerial meeting. I’m Julie Light with Norman Solomon. All this and much more coming up on World Trade Watch.

Peggy Law: It was wonderful to be on the streets and also in the studios you find whatever activists you can find, and if you’re looking for a different topic, they, they will tell you who to go to for that topic. It was a, it was pretty exciting time. It was also a very interesting time. There was a lot of police action, a loss of steer gas, uh, lot of fear, and there were a lot of restrictions, and so it was kind of hard sometimes to be able to get into a restricted area.

Getting in trouble and pick up the activists you wanted and transport them to the studios. But it was also fun and we very little sleep that week and we had a fantastic team that worked well together.

Jessica Partnow: After the team got home to Oakland, they put out an episode highlighting some of their interviews from the week.

Here’s a few clips from that, starting with reporter Julie Light.

Julie Light: Although discussions ranged from intolerable working conditions and export processing zones known as maquiladoras to the sex trafficking of women in the Philippines, one particular theme that resonated with leaders was a strong opposition to the WTO agreement on agriculture. So many of the world’s subsistence farmers are women, and they have been especially hard hit according to Victoria Toly Corpuz (ph) from the Indigenous Network for Policy Research and Education.

Tough agricultural competition forces some Filipinos from one way of life to another.

Victoria Toly Corpuz: Our women who have been doing subsistence production had to shift into some production of cash crops, like potatoes, for instance. But suddenly we were flooded with potatoes from the United States. And the price of this is 50% less than the price of the potatoes that our women are producing.

So many of our women had to go bankrupt and then now there is a huge out migration of women leaving the countryside, rural areas to go to the cities, and they either end up as the urban poor women or some of the women can, can find some employment in the expert processing zone. Other women have to go abroad to work as domestic helpers all over the world.

Now, there are a lot of Filipinos who are domestic workers who are nannies and in some areas as who are working as entertainers or prostitutes, precisely because of this conversion of the land into all these cash crop production, which in the end falls into the hand. Of the big agribusiness corporation.

Protestors: Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets!

Whose streets? Our

Julie Light: Amparo Rey re has been working in a maquiladora assembly plant on the US Mexico border for the last nine years. Since she was just 18, she’s a single mother of two who puts in a 70 hour work week at an electronics assembly plant, making parts for Ford vehicles. You work on the US Mexico border for a US based company.

How has free trade specifically affected you and your life

Amparo Reyes: with. (Spanish)

Julie Light: It affects me more morally, physically, and socially because I can’t have a day of rest.

(Spanish) I can’t have time to talk with my children

(Spanish) about the problems that they have or the problems that I have.

(Spanish) It’s very difficult for me because I’d like the government to know that poor people, we also have a right to live.

(Spanish)

Julie Light: Maybe they’ve never arrived to their house and discovered that they have nothing to eat.

(Spanish) I want my children to be able to continue studying. And to be useful to society,

Lucy Kang: You are listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, focmedia.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. Okay, now back to the show.

Jessica Partnow: We’ve been talking with Peggy Law, one of Making Contact’s, founders about covering the World Trade Organization and the so-called battle in Seattle in 1999.

Peggy Law: Then an interesting thing happened if you look back on the media at that time. You will find that the mainstream media were showing the same things over and over and over again: 50,000 people in the streets, and they were showing the violence, which was probably perpetrated by 25 or 30 people, breaking windows, whatnot, had nothing to do with the activists.

KIRO7 Special Report: The following is a KIRO Seven Eyewitness News Special Presentation.

They are unforgettable, perhaps unforgivable images as the world watches demonstrators determine to disrupt the World Trade Organization, smash windows trash downtown, and clash with police. The sound of anarchy, the smell of tear gas, it is incredibly painful and the incredible sight of Seattle under siege. Four days that changed the way the world looks at Seattle. The whole world is watching! The whole world is watchingFour days that changedge the way we look at our city.

No violence, no gas! Four days that changed the way we look at World Trade. Tonight, a KIRO Seven special report: Four Days in Seattle.

Peggy Law: And so that got kind of boring, I guess. And so they began to look around for other people at the NPR uh station that we were renting.

That station began to look at who we actually had on, and then they would ask them to be on their radio shows afterwards. Then the next thing happened was I started getting telephone calls from mainstream stations. Big, big mainstream stations, wanting to interview our journalists on CBS and ABC, that kind of thing.

So it brought together all of the strengths and all of the positives and all of the fun of what Making Contact was for me. I loved it.

Jessica Partnow: That connection to activism has always been crucial to Making Contact’s work.

Peggy Law: Activists helped us find journalists. Because if we didn’t know any journalist in the town or the state or the country that we were trying to get a story out of, we would go to the activists and say, who do you trust?

And I, I don’t use that term lightly trust because lot of journalists are not trusted that they won’t do with it. But they say they will, they, they’ll misinterpret it, they’ll, uh, do soundbites so that it doesn’t come out what I really was saying, but more than that. When you’re dealing in a lot of places, there is just simply fear of speaking up, and I’m thinking particularly of a program we did out of Afghanistan…

Jessica Partnow: So this is 2002, just after the US overthrew the Taliban government, and of course about 20 years before the Taliban would ultimately return to power.

Here’s an excerpt from that show.

Pratap Chatterjee: Zarmina is the principal of the Fatima Balkh School in Mazar-i-Sharif

Zarmina: there are about 6,000 students in the school, and they’re taught all the subjects that they were taught before the control of the Taliban, such as mathematics, history, geography, Dari, Pashto, English, and some religious subjects as well.

Pratap Chatterjee: Zarmina and her colleagues have been teaching the girls every day, even during the winter break in order to help them catch up with the boys. But the conditions under which they study are harsh to say the least. In one classroom, there were 140 little girls, age six to eight, crammed into a space that measured 17 by 23 feet.

Faisal Ansari is the Director of Education for Balkh Province

Faisal Ansari: During the four years of Taliban control. We lost everything. Now we don’t have any tables, chairs, or desks. We don’t have any books. Even the buildings of the schools have been destroyed. We have to rebuild everything. Even new desks and chairs.

We have to publish new books. Also, Taliban burned a lot of books. They used to say that those books were for the infidels. Not for Muslims. We agree that we are Muslims, but the Islam they taught us was not the real Islam in their opinion. The only person who was a real Muslim was a person who prayed five times a day and studied religious subjects.

They weren’t interested in doctors, lawyers, or engineers.

Peggy Law: We talked to activists there who they could identify the journalists that they would trust to speak to to us. So I think those kind of things made a difference in people’s lives and organizations.

Jessica Partnow: Okay, we’re gonna take a pretty big jump in time here from that story to take us up closer to the present.

But in that time that we’re skipping over, Making Contact was around for some pretty massive shifts in technology. You know, the show existed before podcasts were a thing, and then it became a podcast… before podcasts were the biggest thing. The internet took off and made getting the show out to stations every week a lot easier.

Early episodes had been recorded onto tape reels that I have heard described as the size of pizza boxes. But now everything is digital, happens online. Throughout the years and throughout all of those changes, this show has held onto its values and always explored the impact of US policy and systemic problems on everyday people and the activists fighting for change.

And it’s been a really important independent voice in the media landscape.

Norman Solomon: Corporate media is just so damn powerful. It’s true that there are a whole lot of independent, progressive media outlets that we can reach on the air. They’re usually very underfunded, and the internet is dominated by corporate media.

Even if they bring in a progressive, it’s still in an overall context that hardly helps build, uh, a progressive awareness or, or social movement.

Jessica Partnow: We have time for just one more example. So I wanna share a clip from one of the dozens and dozens of stories that Making Contact has done over the years about the fight for Palestinian liberation.

In 2024, producer Lucy Kang put together a story about life in Gaza. This was one year after October 7th, 2023. Lucy worked closely with Rami Almeghari, a Palestinian journalist based in Gaza, who has been working with Making Contact as a freelancer for at least a decade. Here’s a clip

Lucy Kang: Across the Gaza Strip, Israel has shut down access to food, water, electricity, telecommunications, medical supplies, and many other necessities of life. The blockade has fallen most heavily in the north.

Rami Almeghari: The scale, the large scale of the Israeli Army’s actions, is not perceived well by the international media coverage.

What needs to be understood is the hardships that the people of Gaza are living, in terms of this, Israeli war on the Gaza Strip.

Jessica Partnow: The shows we’ve been talking about today have been very international, but Making Contact has always had both a national and an international focus. And from where I sit here in 2026, connecting all of these issues and the impact of the US at home and abroad is probably more important than ever.

Peggy Law: There is an increasing culture of hatred in this country, and that is going to increase. Activists are in the streets, you know, we see more and more activism coming up, and not all of it is visible, but it is coming up now, and one of the things I hear the most is we will never go back. We’ll never go back, and that would be said over a number of different topics.

What I would like from journalists: notice that it’s happening and find out from the activists what does that really mean? What does that mean in their lives? What does that mean in their communities? What does that mean for the country and at what risk? Because there is an increasing risk to be in the streets.

Jessica Partnow: It’s not about finding the most famous or the most powerful or the most credentialed person. It’s about talking to people on the front lines. People who are quietly organizing in their neighborhoods,

Peggy Law: and that’s what Making Contact does best. I think it’s not the people at the top, it’s the people at the bottom that need the voices.

I think the legacy has been that has made a difference in people’s lives. I hear that, I still hear that from people from way back. That when people’s voices are heard, people feel stronger. They feel like they count, they feel like they can do things. It’s so powerful to have voices heard, and I think that’s one of the biggest legacies and that carries over into organizations also, you know, organizations who are doing the kind of work that is never noticed.

And then it’s noticed and valued and respected. That changes organizations and I think the connections we made between people because we needed to ha other people to make connections, but those connections really mattered.

Jessica Partnow: Before I sign off here, I just wanna acknowledge that this has been a look at the tiniest sliver of what Making Contact has done over the years. The show archive has thousands of hours of really powerful reporting from the past 32 years. We have some plans in the works to share that archive widely in the near future, and we also expect to have some exciting news about the future of Making Contact for you very soon. I can’t say too much just yet, but please stay tuned. That’s it for making contact this week. Thank you so much to Salima Hamirani who did the interviews for this episode; to all the producers whose clips we shared today; to all the producers whose clips we didn’t have time to share today.

To all of the many, many staffers and freelancers who have worked for Making Contact over the years. Huge thanks of course to Peggy Law and to Norman Solomon for talking with us and for the incredible legacy of Making Contact. Adwoa Gyimah Brempong edited this episode. Jeff Emtman is our engineer. Jina Chung is executive director and Lissa Deonorain does digital marketing.

I’m Jessica Partnow. Thanks so much for listening.