Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) unveiled a sweeping plan to protect American journalism on Monday, decrying President Donald Trump s attacks on the media, a spate of megamergers of media companies and the rise of Silicon Valley behemoths leeching advertising dollars from the news industry.

Today, after decades of consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control almost everything you watch, read, and download, Sanders, a 2020 presidential candidate, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review. Given that reality, we should not want even more of the free press to be put under the control of a handful of corporations and benevolent billionaires who can use their media empires to punish their critics and shield themselves from scrutiny.

Read the full article in the Columbia Journalism Review .

Newsroom employment across the U.S. has plummeted since 2008, and the Pew Research Center said last month that the total number of journalism jobs was slashed by nearly a quarter over the past decade. The cuts were largely seen at newspapers, but other massive digital enterprises have seen dramatic rounds of layoffs in recent years, including BuzzFeed , Vice and HuffPost .

From January to May of this year, about 3,000 people working in the news industry were laid off or offered a buyout package, according to an analysis by Bloomberg.

At the same time, news companies have been scrambling for ways to become profitable as traditional advertising dollars dry up (or hunted for billionaire benefactors, such as Jeff Bezos purchase of The Washington Post or Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiongs of the Los Angeles Times ).