Nearly 40 people packed into 44 Columbia Hall on Saturday for Paul Cienfuegos’ workshop “Taking OUR Local Mass Media Back From Large Corporations: We The People Are More Powerful Than We Dare To Believe!”
Cienfuegos’ speech on Friday night had an even larger turnout.
The workshop, which included two speeches, was designed to facilitate discussion on how Eugene citizens might work to decrease corporate control over local mass media. Cienfuegos pointed out that media conglomerates Cumulus Media and Clear Channel currently own 37 percent of radio stations in Eugene.
Cienfuegos also said he wants to educate people about “corporate personhood,” which declares corporations legal persons and gives them property rights, free speech rights and other rights normally guaranteed to ordinary citizens. He described the resulting phenomena as “super personhood,” in which corporations exercise huge amounts of power without public accountability.
“We’re not going to beg corporations for change; we’re going to address corporations as subordinate entities,” activist and workshop organizer Jill Schwab said.
Schwab, currently a campaign finance reform activist, organized the workshop with the hopes of creating awareness about corporate personhood and starting a campaign against corporate domination of the mass media in Eugene. She reiterated Cienfuegos’ point that this is not a left-right political issue but rather a “fundamental issue about American democracy.”
Krista Rojas, who is active in the local branch of the Green Party, attended the workshop because she is concerned by corporate control of information.
“The corporations now control so much of the information, not only that comes to us over the media, but also to us at the University level … I think (the workshop) gave us some hope and some tools to organize,” she said.
Cienfuegos is experienced in battling corporate power. In 1998, his group, Citizens Concerned About Corporations, developed Measure F, which designated two town hall meetings co-sponsored by the Arcata City Council to discuss the question: “Can we have democracy when large corporations wield so much power and wealth under law?”
The second provision of the measure provided for the creation of a committee to advise the city council about issues of corporate control. The measure drew a considerable amount of attention, receiving endorsements from linguist and author Noam Chomsky and famed populist and author Jim Hightower, who said, “The shot heard ’round the world in this case was a ballot, not a bullet.”
The measure passed, and the meetings drew up to 5 percent of the voting population. The Committee on Corporations and Democracy, created by Measure F, proposed legislation to cap the number of “formula restaurants” in Arcata. The legislation passed, barring any more chain restaurants from establishing themselves in Arcata.
Cienfuegos said he is hopeful that his workshops will inspire similar change in Eugene and elsewhere.
“My ultimate goal is to have citizens rise up in a democratic fashion across the United States and insist that local branches of these giant media corporations either shape up or we shut them down and replace them with fully accountable media institutions,” he said.