NewsBeat

May 2023 NewsBeat 6 There's already a solution to the crisis of local news. Just ask this founding father. By STEVEN WALDMAN T hose concerned that government sup- port for the news media would violate the First Amendment might consider the views of one expert on the topic, James Madison. In the early years of the republic, two camps had formed over the question of how much publishers should pay in postage to have their newspapers lugged around the country by horses. One group wanted publishers to pay some postage to partly cover the costs. Madison was more radical. He believed newspapers should be mailed for free. To charge anything would be a "tax on newspapers" — which, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, would be "an insidious forerunner to something worse." Jefferson agreed. It's notable that even the voices that countered Madison and Jefferson (and ultimately prevailed) wanted a massive subsidy. Indeed, the postal subsidy played an important role in standing up our free press. Given the sudden interest in public policy to support community media — bills to help local news are popping up in both Congress and in state legislatures around the country — it's worth revisiting and truly understanding the significant gov- ernment intervention in newspapers that began in the founding era and continued until the mid-20th century. The nation's founders worried how a representative government could work over such a big land mass. How would lawmak- ers truly understand public opinion? "The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained, and the less difficult to be counterfeited," Madison ex- plained in a major newspaper of the time. "The more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty." But Madison had a solution: "Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of senti- ments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people, and Representatives going from, and returning among every part of them, is equivalent to a contraction of terri- torial limits, and is favorable to liberty." What's more, this strategy helped with the other precondition for healthy democ- racy, a well-informed citizenry. George Washington said magazines and gazettes were "vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and amelio- rate the morals of a free and enlightened people." So in 1792, Congress passed the Post Office Act. Publishers would be charged 1 cent for most newspapers and 1.5 cents for those traveling more than 100 miles. This amounted to an enormous subsidy. Rates for regular letters ranged from 6 cents to 25 cents, depending on the distance. The postmaster in 1794 estimated that news- papers constituted 70 percent of the mail while kicking in about 4 percent of the revenue. Postage paid by publishers de- frayed no more than 12-14 percent of costs, concluded Richard Kielbowicz in News in the Mail. Scholar Robert McChesney has estimated that "if the U.S. government sub- sidized journalism today at the same level of GDP that it did in the 1840s, the govern- ment would have to spend in the neighbor- hood of $30-$35 billion annually." That's about the size of NASA's budget. The newspaper-subsidy program worked. The number of publications increased from 200 in 1800 to 1,200 by 1830. The number of dailies grew from 24 in 1820 to 250 in 1850. Alexis de Tocqueville gushed: "It is in America that we find at the same time the greatest number of associations and of newspapers." He was especially impressed with how the news media thrived even in far-flung areas, "an astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers among these savage woods." The key to making this policy work — lo- gistically, constitutionally and politically — was its content-neutrality. Benjamin Frank- lin did not sit around in the Postmaster General's Office deciding whether the New York Gazetteer was wittier than the Massa- chusetts Spy. All newspapers benefited. But that's not to say political factors didn't shape policy. Urban and rural inter- ests viewed the postal subsidy differently. It cost a New York City-based newspaper the same amount to ship to Missouri as to New Jersey, so residents away from the This drawing, by Edwin Forbes, shows the delivery of newspapers to solidiers in a Civil War camp. Library of Congress photo

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