You can always count on Bernie Sanders: Whatever the problem, he’s ready to fix things with more top-down control. Now he’s here to save the news biz.
In an opinion piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, the Vermont socialist unveiled his plan to restore “real journalism,” find “real journalists” and save the profession from what he calls an “assault . . . by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley and Donald Trump.”
Yes, our industry’s got troubles: Journalism jobs have plummeted in recent years; newspapers keep closing all across the country; and even the TV and cable folks are starting to see their revenues drop as the Internet changes everything.
But billionaires aren’t the problem: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is keeping The Washington Post alive as a major paper; biotech gazillionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing the same for the Los Angeles Times.
And, yes, President Trump makes all manner of angry noises about the media — but he’s plainly a boon to liberal outlets, giving them fresh reason to stoke their readers’ and viewers’ outrage every day.
As for Bernie’s “rescue,” well: The crisis he sees is that . . . nobody’s covering his pet subjects as much as he’d like.
Seriously: “At precisely the moment when we need more reporters covering the health-care crisis, the climate emergency and economic inequality,” he rails, “we have television pundits paid tens of millions of dollars to pontificate about frivolous political gossip,” he writes.
Sure sounds like he wants to save journalism by ensuring that he decides what we report.
To get to “real journalism,” Sanders would limit corporate ownership and boost newsroom unions — neither of which would bring in more money to an industry that’s hemorrhaging it.
He does talk about taxing Google and Facebook ads “and using the revenue to fund nonprofit civic-minded media.” Great: Who gets to decide which outlets are truly “civic-minded?” Bernie’s feds, of course.
And that does nothing for the vast majority of media that aren’t nonprofit. There, he says only that he’d “explore new ways to empower media organizations to collectively bargain with” Google and Facebook. Even if that could work, it sounds like creating new media cartels — which he otherwise rages against.
The fact is, Sanders knows nothing about this biz. You can tell by the way he quotes extensively from Joseph Pulitzer — who, for all his high talk of journalistic ideals, was a canny operator who bought the money-losing New York World and helped invent “yellow journalism,” meaning sensational stories about crime, disasters and scandal.
Go save someone else, senator.
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