About a year ago, Current published Steven Waldman‘s piece “The Return of Local News.” Waldman is the president and cofounder of Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project. He also serves as chair of the Rebuild Local News Coalition. In that piece, Waldman wrote:
The collapse of local news is a major crisis for all sorts of reasons. The sixty percent drop in the number of reporters since 2000 means there are 1800 communities with no news and thousands more that have not much more than that. Studies have shown that less local news leads to lower voter turnout, more alienation, more corruption, more waste, more pollution, and even lower bond ratings.
The least obvious consequence of this turn is an increase in polarization. I say least obvious because I bet most people think of journalists as stirring the pot, as fomenting division. We’re not exactly seen as peacemakers.
It turns out that local news actually acts as a counterforce against polarization. For instance, two studies found that communities with more local news had more voters who split their tickets, a sign of less partisan thinking. The working theory is that the vacuums created by the collapse of local news have been filled by other information—cable TV talking heads, social media posts, and, yes, conspiracy theories.
Read the rest here.
Today I want to call your attention to Waldman’s recent piece at Politico: “There’s Already a Solution to the Crisis of Local News. Just Ask This Founding Father.” The Founding Father in question is James Madison, a champion of government support for newspapers.
Here is Waldman:
Those concerned that government support 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 government 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 lawmakers 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 explained 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 sentiments, 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 territorial limits, and is favorable to liberty.”
What’s more, this strategy helped with the other precondition for healthy democracy, 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 ameliorate 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 newspapers constituted 70 percent of the mail while kicking in about 4 percent of the revenue. Postage paid by publishers defrayed 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 subsidized journalism today at the same level of GDP that it did in the 1840s, the government would have to spend in the neighborhood of $30-$35 billion annually.” That’s about the size of NASA’s budget.
Read the rest here.
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