Bernie Sanders endorses a targeted advertising tax to fund local journalism
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On Tuesday morning, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) unveiled a comprehensive plan to protect journalism, including revamped antitrust action against Facebook and Google and new collective bargaining powers for media companies. But Sanders also calls for a more ambitious idea that has been floating around left-wing policy circles all year: a tax on targeted advertising that would funnel money directly from tech giants to local newsrooms.
“We should consider taxing targeted ads and using the revenue to fund nonprofit civic-minded media,” Sanders said in an op-ed in the Columbia Journalism Review. “We must also explore new ways to empower media organizations to collectively bargain with these tech monopolies.”
Free Press, which first laid out…
