Bernie's Daft Plan to Save Journalism - He wants to take a wrecking ball to Google and Facebook. Fake News and democrats say he's going after wrong target. This is good. Trump says the same things....not sure what will come of the current big tech/anti trust cases before congress. Tulsi Gabbard is suing Google, for the same reason we are learning they helped Hillary, they are hurting Tulsi. The democrat establishment who set up the fake news cannot stand Bernie Sanders.  This is fun to watch....democrats now want to support large mergers, cable news and big tech using the internet to sway voters.  They know they are tanking....the fake news. Look what they're up to here: Bernie’s Daft Plan to Save Journalism By JACK SHAFER August 28, 2019 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 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. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/28/bernies-daft-plan-to-save-journalism-227916