US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who has criticized corporate media and accused some outlets of a bias against his campaign, vowed to clamp down on media mergers and toughen enforcement of antitrust laws against tech giants like Facebook and Google, reported Reuters.
In an editorial, Sanders, a US senator from Vermont, wrote that as president he would seek a moratorium on approving mergers of major media corporations, more funding for “non-profit civic-minded media,” and moves to prevent Facebook and Google from siphoning off advertising revenues from news organizations.
Sanders also said he would limit the number of stations that large broadcasting corporations can own in each market and nationwide, and require media corporations to disclose whether their merger proposals would involve “significant” journalism layoffs.
“Today, after decades of consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control almost everything you watch, read, and download,” Sanders wrote in a Columbia Journalism Review editorial published on Monday, August 26.
“Given that reality, we should not want even more of the free press to be put under the control of a handful of corporations and ‘benevolent’ billionaires who can use their media empires to punish their critics and shield themselves from scrutiny.”
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