Bernie Sanders opposes the Orbanization of the US media

The Washington Post editor Martin Baron got all huffy over Bernie Sanders' criticism of the WaPo. Which led to non-Bernie fans tweeting things like this:

The Washington Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, put out a statement dismissing Bernie Sanders' claim that Bezos controls its coverage as a “conspiracy theory”. Sanders is becoming an anti-free press crank like Trump.

— Frank Schaeffer (@Frank_Schaeffer) August 27, 2019

Martin Baron has a good reputation as an editor, even with Charlie Pierce, who is known to be fairly blunt in criticizing editorial policy at different publications. And Frank Schaeffer is also one of the most prominent and important critics of the Christian Right in the US.

But, sorry, Virginia, there really is a corporate/"pro-business" press. This really shouldn't surprise anyone. Pretty much any labor union organizer from the 1820s until today could have explained that point. Very rarely have large newspapers hesitated to back the business position in strikes. And there has been a remarkable increase in business concentration among newspapers in recent decades.

Digby Parton recently (What would you say if you saw this in another country? 08/25/2019) flagged a piece describing how Viktor Orbán method of bringing much of the press in Hungary under his control without bringing them directly and formally under the control of the state, i.e., by having friendly oligarchs dependent on the government buy up the papers. (Lucan Ahmad Way and Steven Levitsky, Lucan Ahmad Way and Steven Levitsky Washington Post/Monkey Cage 01/04/2019.

Oligarchical control of media is also a big problem for democracy in South America.

So why be Pollyannish about the same phenomenon in the US?

As much as it might upset people who are scared of having Sanders as President, he's addressing the American version of the problem. He has an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Bernie Sanders on his plan for journalism 08/26/2019 (internal links not included):

... two Silicon Valley corporations — Facebook and Google — control 60 percent of the entire digital advertising market. They have used monopolistic control to siphon off advertising revenues from news organizations. A recent study by the News Media Alliance, a trade organization, found that in 2018, as newspaper revenues declined, Google made $4.7 billion off reporting that Google did not pay for.

At the same time, corporate conglomerates and hedge fund vultures have bought and consolidated beleaguered local newspapers and slashed their newsrooms — all while giving executives big payouts. Gannett’s proposed merger with Gatehouse Media, for instance, will consolidate hundreds of publications under one mega-corporation’s control and slash $300 million worth of “synergies” — which is often corporate-speak for layoffs. Matt Pearce, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, notes that “the new Gannett/Gatehouse CEO is getting $4.5 million in bonuses and stock just for walking in the door.” [my emphasis]

There are completely legitimate ways to use antitrust law and other regulations on business ownership to block this process and roll it back. And Sanders' position on this addresses the very real problem of the "Orbanization" process going on with the American media:

Also, Jeff Besos does own the Washington Post. Jeff Besos is the founder and current CEO of Amazon, now one of the most powerful monopoly corporations and one of the most problematic, not least because of its awful labor practices. There's also this from, yes, the Washington Post (Aaron Gregg, CIA long relied exclusively on Amazon for its cloud computing. Now it is seeking multiple providers for a massive new contract. 04/02/2019):

The Central Intelligence Agency is taking early steps toward procuring a massive cloud computing infrastructure to support its national security mission, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post, with plans to award a contract worth “tens of billions” of dollars to more than one cloud provider by 2021.

The cloud effort, known as the C2E Commercial Cloud Enterprise, builds on an earlier $600 million cloud computing contract that was awarded to Amazon’s cloud computing division in 2013. And it runs parallel to a separate, $10 billion cloud effort being pursued by the Defense Department. Both efforts are meant to outfit U.S. national security agencies with next-generation cloud computing innovations from Silicon Valley. [my emphasis]

Did Martin Baron did think very carefully about running that article and especially carefully about its wording before they ran it? Does the fact that the Washington Post owner's company Amazon does business with the CIA, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business, taken into account by reporters and editors when reporting on the CIA or on other national security issues? My wild guess is, yes.