Why does the U.S. Postal Service hate liberal blowhards? And conservative calumnists? On July 15, postage rates for periodicals will increase an average of 11.7 percent. On July 16, if one believes the most aggrandizing publishers being hit with these charges, vibrant discourse, an informed citizenry and democracy itself will be pulped and shredded like so many unbought copies of The National Review’s swimsuit issue.
The problem, the publishers explain, is that small, independent publications are going to bear an unfair percentage of the rate hikes. According to one industry study, 30 percent hikes will afflict hundreds of them; another 5,700 will suffer 20 percent increases. Both The Nation and The National Review estimate the new rates will cost them $500,000 a year—enough, their publishers say, to provoke staff reductions, less reporting and higher prices.
Meanwhile, large-circulation publications will only experience 10 percent increases in most cases. Oh, and guess who helped the Postal Service draft this new rate scheme? Everyone’s favorite corporate-media whipping-Godzilla, Time Warner.
Small periodicals targeted at cross-stitchers, crossdressers, Alabama Baptists and myriad other audiences will be affected, but it’s the political magazines that are protesting the loudest. “Small magazines that have historically contributed to the diversity of voices and opinions and have an outsized effect on our public discourse are now potentially silenced so that the likes of Time Warner can mail People more cheaply,” The Nation’s Teresa Stack charged.
“This is the latest, boldest move toward abandoning public-service priorities that support low-advertising, political speech and instead establishing a system that favors ad-heavy magazines like People and Cosmopolitan,” echoed the National Organization of Women.
Don’t those philistine mail-carriers understand that a free press can’t be truly free unless the windy, paternalistic publications that people should be reading are given subsidies to help them compete with publications that people actually want to read? It’s almost as if the Postal Service believes the millions of tacky, trivial losers who read People and Cosmo are important to democracy!
Two hundred years ago, when smoke signals were the closest thing to the iPhone, there were few opportunities to communicate over long distances. To correct this, Congress passed the Postal Act of 1792; in part, it granted newspapers (and eventually magazines) extremely favorable postage rates in order to encourage public discourse and promote a sense of national cohesion. Unlike letters, whose fees were based in part on how far they had to travel, periodicals were charged a flat fee, and a low one at that. By 1794, newspapers constituted 70 percent of the Postal Service’s traffic yet generated only 3 percent of its revenues.
Nurtured by this generous subsidy, a robust national media developed, as did a robust national audience much coveted by advertisers. By 1917, with the country trying to raise funds to underwrite World War I, some Congressional killjoys began questioning why the Postal Service was helping the founders of Good Housekeeping get rich from Ivory soap ads. At this point, the Postal Service began charging publishers two rates: one for a periodical’s editorial pages, one for its advertising pages.
Today, there are many factors that determine how much postage a publisher pays to mail its ad content, but essentially it works like this: The more sorting, bundling and shipping the publisher does itself, the less it has to pay the Postal Service. For publishers whose magazines feature little or no advertising, however, there is no incentive to take such matters into their own hands—they still enjoy the universal flat fee for editorial content.
A few years ago, however, Time Warner and several other large publishers started complaining about this fact. Their titles were cheaper for the Postal Service to process, but they still had to pay the same editorial rates as publishers whose titles required more Postal Service resources. In effect, People and Cosmo were subsidizing The Nation and The National Review.
Under the new rules, a universal flat fee will no longer apply. Instead, publishers who, say, ship presorted magazines to distribution centers located near final delivery points will earn discounts. Publishers who dump sacks of unsorted magazines at their closest post office won’t.
And that’s why postage rates for some magazines will only go up 10 percent, while others may be hit with much higher increases. The Time Warners of the world aren’t getting any free lunches from the Postal Service, nor are they being subsidized by smaller publications. Instead, they’re just paying some other party to perform some processing tasks, or absorbing those costs themselves.
Not that you would have learned any of this from those self-appointed beacons of truth and democracy whose futures may be jeopardized by the new policy. Instead, they mostly offered simplistic corporate-media-is-oppressing-you! hand-wringing. Had they provided a more honest, thorough examination of the situation, one might actually feel a pang of regret regarding their potential imminent demise.