The Bernie Sanders campaign has spent much of August squabbling with news outlets. “There seems to be a direct correlation between the media’s coverage of polls and Bernie Sanders’s specific standing in those polls,” Sanders adviser (and 2016 campaign manager) Jeff Weaver told reporters earlier this month. “The better the number is in the poll, the less coverage he’s received, and the worse he does, the more it receives.” The same day, Sanders himself took aim at The Washington Post, suggesting that unflattering coverage he received in the paper was tied to his criticism of Amazon—which, of course, shares an owner with the Post. Even an anodyne softball game between Sanders’s staff and members of the press became a source of (minor) controversy.

Sanders quickly walked back his criticism of the Post. “Do I think Jeff Bezos is on the phone, telling the editor of The Washington Post what to do? Absolutely not. It doesn’t work that way,” Sanders told CNN. “What I think is in the media in general there’s a framework…. For example, I’ve been in politics for a few years. You know what? Not one reporter has ever asked me ‘Bernie, what are you going to do about the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality?’”



Though not perfectly articulated, Sanders had a point. By attrition and consolidation, the media is dominated by a handful of large, corporate institutions—as a result, the priorities of what is and isn’t covered are often skewed.



On Monday, Sanders wrote an op-ed in the Columbia Journalism Review that both expands on that media critique and provides a compelling vision of a better future—for the press and for everyone else. It is, like much of the senator’s best work, an amalgam of concerns: the role of corporations and financial institutions in everyday life, growing income inequality and corporate consolidation, and the state of democracy. The plan is, to a large extent, an antitrust plan disguised as a media policy—though, if enacted, it would do a great deal to reverse the technology- and hedge-fund-induced ravages of the past decade.



The CJR op-ed starts by making the case that journalism must be saved from the corporate media’s love of shallow and self-serving commentary:

