December 2003 January 2004
Our
Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed
Bill Moyers
Reclaiming
Local Media
Paul Cienfuegos
What
You Need to Know About Electronic Voting
William Rivers Pitt
Will
the 2004 Election by Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines?
William Rivers Pitt
Myths
of the Hermit Kingdom
Eric Sirotkin
Heresies
in Pursuit of Peace
Eric Sirotkin
The
Empire Strikes Out
Kenny Ausubel
Relationships
and Culture
Nita Simons
The
Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon
Tai
Chi and Qigong
Bill Douglas
A
Relationship Practice
Kayla M. Starr, MPH
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
Reclaiming Local Media
By Paul Cienfuegos
“If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn’t be someone from our company. We’re not in the business of providing news and information. We’re not in the business of providing well-researched music. We’re simply in the business of selling our customers’ products.” - Lowry Mays, CEO, Clear Channel Communications, owner of over 1200 radio stations.
Last month I traveled to Madison, Wisconsin to attend the extraordinary National Conference on Media Reform. I had the privilege of leading workshops at the Conference which focused on tactics relating to the democratizing our media, and which asked participants to contemplate what role they might be willing to play in their own communities.
We are in a crisis situation in this country where giant corporations now control virtually all aspects of our society—from funding election campaigns to choosing news stories and framing the boundaries of the debate, educating and entertaining our kids, growing our food, owning our drinking water distribution systems. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are now so dependent on corporate money and ideas that we can no longer even honestly say that we have a party of opposition anymore in Washington DC.
When giant corporations own virtually all of our mainstream media, and control our federal government, it is only we the people of this country who are left to figure out how to get our democracy back. And this is going to be a very challenging task indeed, for without open and functioning feedback loops that an effective mass media provides, we the people no longer get to know what we the people are thinking. The result has been that most of us end up believing we must be outside of the mainstream of public opinion, since we rarely hear anyone who speaks for us, who voices our own concerns. And so we silence ourselves, which is what people do in a totalitarian society, and which is perhaps the biggest catastrophe of all.
So what can the average person do about this? I am convinced that the most effective place to challenge the corporate media’s stranglehold on our society is in the towns and cities where we Americans already live. What we need is a plan of action that is designed to be led and won at the local level—in hundreds of American cities and towns by millions of ordinary people—a plan which includes focusing our collective attentions on our local corporate media offices with ongoing campaigns in hundreds of communities which are connected to each other in sister-city relationships. If our goal is to democratize the mainstream media in this country, than we should be doing our work as democratically as is humanly possible.
As a grassroots community organizer with 26 years experience, I have come to believe the following:
All work is ultimately local. For the ordinary citizen to comfortably choose to become part of a media reform movement, it would have to be local in its goals and led by local people. It would have to be created and designed democratically through an open and ongoing program of outreach to the entire community (not just our friends and allies), and perhaps most importantly, its primary funding would come from those who directly participate in it.
Most Americans are extremely concerned about the corporatization of our society. Regardless of our party affiliation, age, or location, we are capable of working together to insist that our local mainstream media become responsive to the people of our area.
The notion that the average American doesn’t care about the state of our media is just plain wrong. Most Americans don’t participate as citizens because they feel that their efforts will be fruitless, that their voices will be ignored by the powers that be, that their act of voting just further energizes a corrupt and broken election system. Sadly, for most Americans, the boundaries of caring have now retreated to the edges of our physical yards and immediate families and friends. It’s a tragedy of enormous proportions, but it’s more an indication of the state of our society than of the apathy of its citizens.
The best way to challenge these giant media conglomerates is at their thousands of local TV stations and newspapers. The place where they are each most vulnerable to citizen action is where we already live! Activists love to travel great distances to participate in mass actions. The average American does not. Activists have the luxury of being able to leave home for days or weeks at a time. The average American must somehow find the time to squeeze their civic participation into a very tiny number of brief moments of freedom each week.
Therefore, if we are serious about building a large enough movement to challenge the corporatization of our mainstream media institutions, what better way is there than to frame our goals and strategies in a language that resonates with most Americans no matter where we each stand on the ideological spectrum—to ask each of us to focus our energies on the local corporate media offices which presently produce the “infotainment” being offered up as news. With campaigns which are designed to offer empowering, exciting, and ongoing opportunities to all participants so that everyone experiences a direct relationship between their collective actions and the results.
What makes me so optimistic about this strategy for media reform is that this is one of those issues where almost everyone already agrees. We just don’t know we do.
Regardless of our worldviews, most of us want our news sources to tell us the truth. We want our media to be properly funded so reporters have the resources they need to do an adequate job. We want a firewall between editors and journalists on one side, and advertisers on the other. We want the media institutions’ decision makers and owners to be held accountable for their actions. We want local control and/or ownership of local media institutions. And we want access to a full spectrum of opinion on the issues of the day.
Imagine if that yearning could be translated into a demand. And imagine if—in every city and town—that demand was coming not merely from progressive groups, but from thousands of people and organizations across the political spectrum. Try to imagine how much trust-building might take place among people who think they have little in common, but who ultimately find out how much they respect and agree with each other.
Now imagine the exponential potential of this sort of community-based organizing. People in Eugene and Florence and Medford coordinating their activities with people in Eureka and Santa Rosa and Redding, all challenging the supposed “rights” of the same corporations to provide their local news. Imagine the extraordinary power we would have in dozens if not hundreds of cities in coordinated actions.
Real democratic action, action linked to sustained campaigns, can only happen where people live—and almost everyone lives somewhere that is currently serviced by a local branch office of a giant media corporation. Let’s roll up our sleeves, and get to work in our own communities. There is much to do, and the task is truly urgent. And heck, we may actually discover that we have more in common with our neighbors than we could ever have imagined; and that it’s not as impossible as we thought it would be to demand a mass media that provides accurate and comprehensive news and analysis from voices as diverse as those of the American people.
Paul Cienfuegos will be leading evening workshops relating to democratizing our local media in early January from Bellingham to Ashland, and later throughout the western US. If you wish for him to come to your community, please contact him soon to reserve a date. He is also looking for others with workshop facilitation experience who are interested in leading workshops on this topic in their communities. Paul is co-founder of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County and current chairperson of the City of Arcata Committee on Democracy and Corporations (the first committee of its kind in the US), which both work to dismantle corporate rule and invigorate participatory democracy. Paul’s online bookstore at www.100fires.com offers books about corporations, democracy, and the media. For more information about Paul’s work contact him at (707) 825-0740; cienfuegos@igc.org; POB 27, Arcata, CA 95518. For Democracy Unlimited contact Kaitlin at (707) 269-0984; duhc@monitor.net; or POB 610, Eureka, CA 95502; or visit www.duhc.org. To find out which corporations own your local mainstream media institutions, visit www.openairwaves.org/telecom/analysis/default.aspx.
