Getty Images Fourth Estate Bernie’s Daft Plan to Save Journalism

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Journalism needs a plan—a plan to save itself from the cockeyed plan to “save” the industry that Sen. Bernie Sanders uncorked earlier this week in the Columbia Journalism Review. The Sanders scheme would add layers of regulatory supervision to the news business, levy new taxes, subsidize news outlets he favors (nonprofits) and deter additional newspaper mergers. But the journalism business isn’t the only target of Sanders’ intervention. He also wants to block future mergers of entertainment companies like Viacom and CBS, which just rejoined forces after splitting up in 2006. And he also intends to swing a giant antitrust wrecking ball at Google and Facebook.

In seeking to shape journalism’s future, Sanders completely mistakes journalism’s past. And in his rush to put his stamp on the media’s future, he relies on half-baked statistics. For the sake of the Sanders for president campaign, we can only hope that he’s given sharper thought to his plans for the economy, foreign policy, criminal justice and the environment.


On one point, Sanders is correct. The newspaper industry as we’ve known it for 130 years is dying. Newsrooms have lost 25 percent of their jobs since the glory days of 2008. Circulation has collapsed. Newspapers have gone. But Sanders seems unwilling to accept that the industry is dying for good reasons. Newspapers were once one of the most profitable sectors in the economy, returning 30 percent margin profits and earning owners billions. But as new competition arrived—first cable TV and then the internet—readers and advertisers began to abandon them. Circulation, which topped 60 million in 1990 has dipped below 30 million. Advertising and circulation revenue, which peaked at about $50 billion in 2005 has fallen below an estimated $15 billion and both are destined to keep falling. Nothing short of a biblical miracle, which the Sanders plan is not, will ever bring newspapers readers and advertisers back in those numbers. You’d have an easier time resurrecting the mass markets for film cameras and typewriters.

Instead of blaming readers for canceling their subscriptions and advertisers for moving their spots online, Sanders mistakenly places the onus on Google and Facebook, “forces of greed that are pillaging our economy,” for the newspaper bust. So desperate is he to cast Google and Facebook as the villains that he repeats the bogus research claim that Google siphoned off $4.7 billion worth of reporting it did not pay for. (See the robust debunking of that number by Slate’s Jordan Weissmann.) Nowhere does he explain that advertisers bailed from newspapers, which held monopoly pricing power in their territories, for internet outlets because the internet outlets provide a superior product at a lower price.

Sanders also laments the “corporate conglomerates and hedge fund vultures” who are consolidating the newspaper industry. While it’s true that many of these opportunists are slowly liquidating these properties (see my earlier column), they’re only hastening the coming end for many newspapers, not causing it. Even if Congress were to pass every Sanders proposal to arrest newspaper conglomeration tomorrow, the industry would still be on a death march, with fewer titles publishing fewer pages, with fewer employees.

But “saving” newspapers is only part of the Sanders plan. The biggest of big media offend him, so his plan also advocates new limits on how many broadcast stations large broadcast operations can own. He also calls for new rules to make labor organization easier at media outlets; a scheme under which employees can buy for-sale media properties through employee stock-ownership plans; a requirement for corporations to disclose how many journalists will be laid off after a proposed merger or acquisition; and the prevention of mergers and deregulation decisions “that adversely affect people of color and women.”

One unintended result of these regulatory cinches would be to reduce the value of all the properties they touch, making it more expensive for owners to attract capital to grow or even survive. Is that what Sanders wants? I think so. It’s easy to beat up on big media. I do it almost weekly. They have a record of pulling punches for their corporate brothers. But Sanders unnecessarily fetishizes small media as if it is the only fearless purveyor of news. People who grew up in small towns where the newspaper was owned by locals can regale you with tales of compromised coverage of the local banks, the city council and the area car dealers. Neither small nor big is necessarily bad, only bad is bad.

The Sanders plan folds in on itself and collapses in its final paragraphs where he proposes levying new taxes on online targeted ads and “using the revenue to fund nonprofit civic-funded media.” How many different ways is this idea wrong? We already extend tax dollars to nonprofit civic-minded media, namely public radio and television, so the idea is a tad redundant. Also, how would Sanders feel if Trump or a Trump-like politician ultimately decided whose nonprofit news organizations these tax dollars supported? Finally, has it occurred to Sanders that by subsidizing nonprofit civic-minded media, he will be creating new competition for the small, local, endangered media, the very media over which he has positioned himself as guardian?

Like the conservatives he disparages, Sanders wants to return to the imagined glories of the past. I’m all for independent news and more local news, but the senator’s overreaching interventions won’t get us there.

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In the opening paragraphs of his piece, Sanders claims that “real journalism” exposed the crimes of Watergate. As historians of journalism W. Joseph Campbell and Mark Feldstein note, the real heroes were federal prosecutors, federal judges, the FBI, grand juries, Congress and the Supreme Court. “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit,” as Bob Woodward once said. Send horseshit to [email protected]. My email alerts want its hands on some of that new tax revenue Sanders’ plan intends to raise. My Twitter feed wants to conglomerate. My RSS feed wants to pillage the economy.