By Grace Medecki
Rosie Bultman, 21, applies her passion for social justice to everything she does. As a History of Public Policy and Law major and Black Studies minor, she has taken her hunger for knowledge of injustice to UC Santa Barbara’s radio station KCSB. Bultman is the news director and hosts the People’s Program, where she speaks with human rights activists from California to the Middle East about social justice. Bultman was honored this year by the Radio and Television News Association (RTNA) of Southern California with their Golden Mic for reporting.
UCSB students Rosie Bultman and Zoe McCullough wrote, produced and directed the documentary The Takeover, about the 1968 student occupation of North Hall.
In addition to radio reporting, she has also taken her interest in social justice to film. Bultman’s film The Takeover, about the 1968 student occupation of UCSB’s North Hall, details through the voices of activists the founding of the university’s Black Studies department. Her documentary, which was co-produced with Black Studies student Zoe McCullough, recently won a Gold Award at the Encino, California-based International Independent Film Awards.
In a recent interview, Bultman discussed the influence of her studies on the documentary, as well as the impact she hopes her film has on the UCSB community.
Q: What made you decide that you wanted to get into reporting? Was it a goal that you had before coming to UCSB, or was it something that you realized once you got here?
A: In my high school, I wrote a paper about the reporting and the media landscape around the crack epidemic, and I was super invested in this, how different outlets decided to report on things. Then I had a great conversation with a pretty famous journalist named Lowell Bergman [ABC News, CBS-60 Minutes], because he was the grandfather of somebody who was on the debate team with me, and he was driving me to a tournament.
I just found it all super fascinating, this whole idea of the media landscape and how we get the information that we read about, and that we consider as fact. Because I did debate in high school, I listened to a ton of news podcasts… I was always listening to informational podcasts, and I really enjoyed those. So when I saw the KCSB newsletter I was like, wow, I can get involved in news reporting on the radio. It all came together, this passion for the media landscape and public information, alongside this passion I had for listening to news podcasts. I came here and I was hooked ever since. Once I do something, I'm in it. So that's how it was here from the beginning.
Q: In what ways have your History studies at UCSB pushed you towards reporting?
A: I decided to declare a Black Studies minor after taking a few classes in the Black Studies department and after I started pursuing a documentary about the founding of the Black Studies department here at UCSB. I already knew that the department was founded on activism, but just talking to everybody I learned about how hard they fought to not only create, but maintain the department. I thought, ‘I want to declare this minor because basically every single Black Studies class that I take has some sort of social justice emphasis.’ Yes, we're learning about history. Yes, we're learning about politics and culture. But there's always this social justice undertone or overtone, depending on the topic, and that's something that I'm super interested in also.
Q: You went on to make a film, The Takeover, about this historic event at UCSB. Why were you interested in making it?
A: I got the job as Archives Coordinator here at KCSB in July of 2023. One of the things as I was scrolling through that I noticed was audio of the Black Student Union protests in 1968, ‘69 and ‘70. I started listening to this audio and thought it was super interesting. I was like, ‘I'm going to make this radio series.’ I planned it all out pretty meticulously, and I was fortunate enough to get to talk to four people who were there during the protest. Those interviews spoke to me like crazy. I wanted to do more with it, but I didn't really know what. I went to the office of Black Student Development to tell them about what I was doing. The late director, Elroy Pinks, encouraged me to turn this into a video documentary. He put me in contact with the [film’s] co-director, Zoe McCullough, and that's kind of how it all started.
Q: Now switching towards your work at KCSB and in radio news, you host the People’s Program. What does this project entail?
UCSB History of Law and Public Policy student Rosie Bultman in her studio at KCSB, UCSB’S radio station.
A: The People's Program is a radio show that I started around June of 2024. It explores global politics from the perspectives of experts, and people on the ground. That's what I said at the beginning of each episode. It has been the best educational experience of my college career, because I learn how to produce a show, and that entails identifying a story, figuring out what kind of unique spin I can have on the story. Is there something that the US press isn't talking about that I can bring into the landscape? Are there maybe two things that are happening at once that I want to tie together and make a connection there? So, figuring out an issue, figuring out the angle on the issue, and then figuring out who to talk to, and then getting the person that you want to talk to, to talk to you back—which is definitely the hardest part of the show. I've had my fair share of really late nights where I'm trying to reach somebody in Palestine or South Asia, and the time difference is huge, and it's midnight, and it's 9 a.m. over there, and I'm like, ‘Hey, is somebody available for an interview within the next five days?’ And they're like, ‘uh, maybe, um.’ So that has been a huge learning experience in and of itself, giving me these tools in terms of production and reaching out to people. It's a lot of work. Right now, I'm doing them less frequently, but for summer, fall and winter, I was doing them weekly. I was doing it over and over again. It's a lot, but, you know, it was super rewarding. So, it was worth it.
Q: What impact are you hoping your projects will have on the UCSB community?
I hope that it identifies issues that people want to combat. There's a ton of things going on. Most of everything we consume in the US is made unethically in some way, and it's really overwhelming to understand all of the injustices going on in the world. I can illuminate issues that have spoken to me. I hope that they'll speak to other people. When we talk about both past and present social movements, what their tactics were for making change and how successful those tactics are, it's a little study book for any activist or any future change maker that wants to make change. For example, with The Takeover, the documentary explores a lot of different strategic moves that they took, some that worked and some that didn't. And again, it was over 40 or 50 years ago. There are some parallels, and there are some things that aren't going to work nowadays. But there may be some basic principles in that documentary that will speak to people. In order to get somebody to agree to a demand of a super minority on campus, you have to address something that the university really cares about. You can't just address something that the university moderately cares about.
Grace Medecki is a third year double major in History of Public Policy and Law and Communication, and is intending to pursue the Professional Writing minor in the Journalism track. She wrote this article for her Digital Journalism class.