Closest Place With No Clear Channel Ads: Bergen, Norway

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A small city in Norway shows us that activism can be effective and that advertising doesn’t have to consume our (uh… their) lives. Activists in Bergen, a small university town on the Western coast, took on Clear Channel — not wanting their beautiful town to be overrun with advertisements — and succeeded. (Well almost — more later.) I know! As an American, I can’t imagine a life without constant ads that are plastered everywhere — on every highway billboard and on public transit. And then there is product placement in movies and TV shows, and of course, there’s cable and local television’s 40:20 rate of show-viewing to ads. It’s nauseating, really. Mother Jones reported on this very topic in our current issue. “Ad Nauseum” is chock full of statistics, including that children alone are exposed to 40,000 ads per year.

But in Bergen, Norway, citizens weren’t going to let their children, or the adults, face this ominous future. Faced with budget constraints, the City Council began negotiations with Clear Channel and one other company in 2004. The winning company would fund the building of the city’s bus shelters and in return, the company would gain ad space in the city (on the bus shelters as well as on some lighted billboards elsewhere). It looked like Clear Channel had sealed the deal, when out of the blue, activists in the community showed up on the scene with its “Keep Clear Channel Out of Bergen” campaign. They started a mailing list and instead of demonizing the corporation they rallied around keeping their aesthetically pleasing city, with its deep roots, just the way it is. In the end, the Bergen City Council nixed the deal. Clear Channel of course sued them for breach of conduct and the outcome is pending, but regardless, it is a pretty cool victory.

So, is it that Norwegians are just way more progressive and efficient than we are? Or is it just easier for small towns and universities to take on a clear and concise enemy? Why can’t big cities do this type of work or the entire nation for that matter? Are the problems just too large? Or are they just too far away for people to feel the impact enough to activate?

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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