The blogosphere, TikTok, etc. may not be highly regulatable to assure fair and balanced reporting but to the extent that media outlets are granted licenses and access to air ways and other distribution networks with some level of government control, we should look at leveraging that to restrict highly biased reporting.

We need stringent anti-monopoly/oligarchy rules.

- No person, partnership, or corporation may directly, or indirectly, own a controlling interest in more than one media company, international, national, state, or local.

- No person, partnership, or corporation may directly, or indirectly, own a controlling interest in more than one financial company, international, national, state, or local.

- No artificial person (non-human being) may donate to any campaign, political action committee, advocacy group, lobbyist, directly, or indirectly.

- All commercial entities, corporations, LLCs, partnerships, trusts, and their like, exist at the sufferance of the people. The licenses, charters, articles of incorporation, shall be publicly reviewed and audited every 20 years. Entities found to be in repeat violation of the law, shall be dissolved. Shareholders may preserve the entity by immediately firing corporate management. The entity will then be on probation, subject to annual reviews/audits for 10 years. Further violations shall result in dissolution of the entity, and sale of all assets.

- Fines for violations of the law shall equal 1% of gross revenue for the first offense, 10% of gross revenues for the second offense, 25% of gross revenues, for each subsequent offense, and subject to immediate dissolution. These fines shall apply to the entity as a whole, and officers of the entity individually (based on their compensation).

- Fines levied by the government shall not be tax deductible, nor dischargable in bankruptcy.

- Compensation to management that exceeds 100x the lowest employee's salary shall not be tax deductible. For the purposes of determining the lowest salary, contractors and subcontractors shall be included in the calculation.

Snip
Thai reformist Pita Limjaroenrat's bid to be nominated prime minister has ended, prompting outrage from his supporters after he won May's election.
The 42-year-old was first dramatically suspended from parliament by the constitutional court, forcing him to leave the debating chamber.
Lawmakers then agreed to block a second vote on whether he should be PM.
The Move Forward party leader had swept to victory in the general election as voters rejected years of military rule.

Snip

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66219602

The non-elected senate (which is a military body) banned him from politics for 10 years and banned the party he was with forever.

Mr Pita, a Harvard graduate and former tech executive, won on the promise of major reforms, including a pledge to amend lese-majeste, Thailand's strict royal defamation laws, pitting him against the unelected senate and other conservatives who say he poses a threat to the monarchy.

His party and himself rallied the nation to support marriage equality. Thailand has it now and marriages will start on Jan 23, 2025.

Under the legislation, passed by Thailand’s parliament and endorsed by the king last year, same-sex couples will be able to register their marriages with full legal, financial, and medical rights, as well as adoption and inheritance rights.

...too few noticing nor creation of restrictions.

PBS, BBC, many local newspapers, and some international outlets etc.

obvious where we were heading, but when LA Times, Washington Post blocked the presidential endorsements by their billionaire owners, there was no ambiguity of corporate control over content.

When 60 minutes censored the piece on the Tobacco companies was the real canary in the coal mine.

Look at the way they turned hard against Biden and Harris when they announced they were raising their taxes.

This cannot go on forever and they are setting themselves up for huge falls and it can be ugly.

Big Pharma, and... am I missing any?

Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Of course he thinks every private interest is oligarchical. He's also wrong, and disastrously out of touch with the people of America, who just gave Donald Trump a popular vote victory.

So Sanders is against private ownership of media firms, like Twitter and The Washington Post, and privately controlled media, like Meta and (presumably) The New York Times. He's also against publicly held firms like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, and Paramount, which he calls "Wall Street firms", deliberately conflating them with financial industry firms, so that people can transfer their biases.

Sanders specifically calls out private ownership in general as the problem here. He's not calling out monopolistic ownership or even foreign ownership. He's not calling out the state ownership of TikTok (which he voted against banning). He sees private ownership of media, a right protected by the First Amendment, as a problem.

At some point, people other than Sanders will have to look at the media environment and see how it consists of dozens upon dozens of firms and reconcile the lack of popularity of their politics with their desire to get elected. It's easier and wrong to say that the diverse set of interests that control these firms are acting in concert to suppress your preferred ideas rather than accept that these firms, which mostly act with a profit motive, are catering to their audience, who mostly oppose your politics. No, much more comforting to be the permanent and righteous opposition, forever blaming the ever-changing "oligarchy".

Bernie is right on all accounts. Antitrust laws had a reason. Whether it's individuals, or firms it doesn't matter it's still bullshit and it still concentration of power and wealth. Calling Bernie a socialist doesn't make your argument any better.

We need to reinstate the doctrine of fairness in reporting. And we need to break down all of these trusts whoever and however they are owned.. period.
So don't go on a big old rant blaming Bernie for using the wrong term. He is spot on on all accounts people should have listened to him many many years ago

I get how you might think I was slandering him by calling him a socialist, since it's an incredibly unpopular and immiserating political philosophy but it's literally how he describes himself and it's entirely consistent with how he's diagnosing the problem: he blames private ownership. He wants to restrict private ownership of media, despite it being one of our most cherished liberal freedoms, explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment.

Your understanding of the Fairness Doctrine is flawed and I wonder which oligarch's media you might have consumed to reach your understand of it. The Fairness Doctrine applied to broadcasters that held a limited license of a physical resource: the airwaves. It never applied to print journalism or any other non-limited medium. There is absolutely no Constitutional basis to restrict ownership or demand the publishing of any particular political viewpoints in the media, in general.

You also bring up antitrust. Well, then why does Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk figure so prominently in these complaints? They both own exactly one media property, neither of which are monopolies, and no other media businesses. Bezos' media company isn't even particularly big and has multitudes of competitors. Sanders, a Senator in the United States Congress, brings them up because he considers them political opponents and he wants to restrict their First Amendment rights on that basis alone: "So you already have a major serious problem in terms of ownership of the media".

And I'm not blaming Bernie for using the "wrong term". I'm blaming him on being wrong and proposing illiberal policy ideas incompatible with the First Amendment. But, yeah, go ahead and bang your head on the wall when you see somebody defend liberal principles on a Democratic website.