The following description comes from the event organizer.

“I broke two prosthetic devices carrying TVs,” she says. “I dedicated my time, my money, my body to public access.” – Virginia Brookbush, Seattle Times

Channel 29, Seattle’s first public access channel, was introduced in 1983 as part of an agreement between the city of Seattle and cable provider Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI). TCI owned the channel and funded the Northwest Access and Production Center on Aurora, where citizens could learn to operate and rent TV production equipment and record TV programs of their own design.

Virginia Brookbush was one such citizen, and absolutely a cut above the rest. After graduating Idaho State University at age 52, the “matron saint of Seattle public-access TV” moved to Seattle in 1970, and promptly began laying the foundation for her Community Television Agency (CTA), an organization dedicated to helping amateurs access the communicative potential of television. Brookbush’s staunch commitment to uncensored freedom of speech and information was magnetic, and the community she created through her work was highly productive. By the late 1970s, CTA was producing as many as seven half-hour public-access programs a week; predominantly volunteer productions that were financed by Brookbush herself, first from her regular income, and eventually out of her Social Security checks.

This program is a selection of excerpts from CTA shows, digitized from 3/4″ U-matic videotapes donated  to Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry in 2021 by Derek Creisler, a friend of Brookbush who she trained as a videographer. They tell the story of CTA’s origins, then vault through a gamut of topics – local, international, artistic, spiritual, historical, political – that emphasize the inclusion of perspectives that are unlikely to be heard from in mass media.