At CJR, Bernie Sanders writes an op-ed outlining his plan for journalism. Sanders targets both Wall Street and Silicon Valley companies like Facebook and Google for “the decimation” of the press. The Vermont senator and presidential hopeful proposes regulations to limit media mergers, requiring media companies to disclose whether there will be layoffs if mergers are approved, promoting new progressive leadership of the FCC, and strictly enforcing antitrust laws against technology companies like Facebook and Google, among other policies. As Sanders puts it, “Our constitution’s First Amendment explicitly protects the free press because the founders understood how important journalism is to a democracy. More than two centuries after the constitution was signed, we cannot sit by and allow corporations, billionaires, and demagogues to destroy the Fourth Estate, nor can we allow them to replace serious reporting with infotainment and propaganda.”
Richard Booth, the British bookseller who made Hay-on-Wye a preeminent bookshop town, has died at the age of eighty. Booth, who opened his first store in Hay in 1961, was awarded the MBE in 2004. In 1977, he proclaimed that Hay-on-Wye was an independent kingdom, appointing himself as “king of Hay.” As one colleague remembers, “He was genuinely and deeply eccentric.”
At Poynter, a look at how the Seattle Times is pursuing stories of people who have been deported.
At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick looks at the ways in which journalism has begun to stand in for meaningful legal action on #MeToo cases: “Trial-by-outrage doesn’t attempt to do the other work of judicial proceedings or ethics hearings—the work of meting out proportionate punishment, and crafting mechanisms for restitution and rehabilitation. And if you think that the lack of clear on-ramps back into society, of paths for restitution, has absolutely nothing to do with people’s resistance to admitting their mistakes, I’d suggest you think again.”