[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 183 (Friday, November 17, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S17359-S17360]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      STAMPING OUT THE LITTLE GUYS

  Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, Victor Navasky, publisher of the Nation and 
many years ago an aide to Senator Ed Muskie, recently had an item in 
the Washington Post that we ought to be paying attention to; and I hope 
the Postal Rate Commission will look at carefully.
  What the Postal Service should be doing is encouraging the free flow 
of ideas.
  We talk about the melting pot strength of America sometimes as if it 

[[Page S 17360]]
  were a breeding process. The Italians marry the Germans and the Germans 
marry the Chinese and so forth. In fact the melting pot strength of 
America is the cross-fertilization of ideas. And anything that weakens 
that flow of ideas weakens America.
  Journals like the Nation and their counterparts on the conservative 
side render a huge public service.
  It is of interest to me to note that as you look at the rise in the 
rate of delivering packages containing everything from diapers to 
cashews, the increase in the rate of growth of sending these through 
the Postal Service has not been as great as the increase in sending 
ideas through the mail.
  Frankly, Federal Express and United Postal Service and all their 
counterparts can deliver diapers and cashews just as well as the postal 
service. But the Postal Service provides the ideas that are important 
to the Nation.
  One other item that I frankly was not aware of until I read Victor 
Navasky's column op-ed piece was that ``periodicals heavy in editorial 
content * * * will for the first time be charged postage by the mile.''
  If that is accurate, and I am asking my staff to check that out right 
now, that is a great disservice. People in Alaska or Hawaii or the 
remotest U.S. territory should have the opportunity for ideas as much 
as people that live in Chicago or New York City or Washington, DC.
  I ask that the Victor Navasky op-ed piece be printed in the Record 
and I urge my colleagues to read it.
  The material follows:

  Stamping Out the Little Guys--Don't Let Postal Rate Reform Crush Us 
                        Small Opinion Magazines

                          (By Victor Navasky)

       The Founding Fathers saw the circulation of opinion and 
     intelligence as a condition of self-governance, and a postal 
     service as the circulatory system of democracy. That is why, 
     among other reasons, Benjamin Franklin agreed to serve as 
     postmaster general. That is why Thomas Jefferson sought to 
     persuade President Washington to appoint Thomas Paine as 
     postmaster general. That is why Washington himself believed 
     that all newspapers--which in those days were frequently 
     partisan, radical and rabblerousing--should be delivered free 
     of charge.
       And that is why (not to put myself in such illustrious 
     company) I agreed to add my two pence to the 17,000 pages of 
     testimony accumulated by the Postal Rate Commission, which is 
     considering a proposal that would undermine the postal 
     principle deemed by the Founding Fathers to be essential to 
     the enlightenment of the Republic. Namely, preferential 
     treatment for carriers of information and opinion.
       While we have heard too much about how Time Warner's rap 
     records have contributed to the degradation of public 
     discourse, we have heard too little about how lawyer-
     lobbyists for Time Warner and Dow Jones are pushing a 
     proposed postal ``reform.'' Its main consequence would be to 
     reward advertising-crammed mass magazines and newspapers and 
     penalize small periodicals. It would especially hurt those 
     with the highest percentage of editorial content, such as the 
     journal of opinion whose financially precarious business it 
     is to carry on the policy debate that democracy requires. To 
     German philosopher Juergen Habermas, such journals are house 
     organs to the public sphere and their role is nothing less 
     than ``to set the standard for reasoned argumentation.''
       One would have thought that the Magazine Publishers of 
     America, which in theory represents all magazines large and 
     small, would sound the alarm. But no, that job has been left 
     to the American Business Press, which represents mostly 
     smaller publications. Whether or not it is because a minority 
     of its members, including Time Warner, pay a majority of its 
     dues, MPA, along with the Postal Service, has been 
     aggressively promoting a reclassification scheme whose 
     consequence will be a de facto transfer of expense from 
     magazines with a circulation in the millions, like People, to 
     magazines with comparatively small circulations, among them 
     the Nation.
       On the surface, the reclassification proposal makes free-
     market sense. The plan would divide what is now second-class 
     mail into two sub-classes and reward those periodicals that 
     save the Postal Service sorting time and shipping costs by 
     giving them a lower rate. The catch, however, is that for the 
     most part, only the nation's largest magazines will qualify 
     for the lower rate. Periodicals that do not have 24 or more 
     subscribers in 90 percent of the relevant ZIP codes need not 
     apply. Magazines too small to print regional editions and 
     hire private trucks to deliver them to regional post offices 
     will suffer. So will periodicals heavy in editorial content 
     (which will for the first time be charged postage by the 
     mile, reversing nearly two centuries of postal policy 
     favoring editorial content over advertising). And so too will 
     those without the technology to do what is quaintly known as 
     ``pre-sortation'' (sorting in advance by ZIP code, which the 
     Nation does but some of our smaller siblings can't).
       Time Warner and other biggies will save millions on their 
     postal rates; journals of opinion and most magazines with 
     circulations under 100,000 will pay at least 17 percent more. 
     No wonder, then, that the Postal Rate Commission's own Office 
     of the Consumer Advocate denounced the plan because it would 
     offer ``deeper discounts only to the largest and most 
     technologically sophisticated mailers.''
       So the Postal Service would turn the historic mission of 
     second-class mail on its head. Until now, the independent 
     Postal Rate Commission has barred the door against those who 
     would drive the public-interest factor out of the rate-making 
     process. It would be a tragedy if, at a time of unprecedented 
     media concentration, one of the few remaining institutions 
     dedicated to the propagation, circulation and testing of new 
     policy ideas--the journal of opinion--were the casualty of 
     lobbying by the very forces making it more important than 
     ever that the independent voice be heard--whether the Nation, 
     the New Republic or the new Weekly Standard.
       The Postal Service is chartered as a public service and, as 
     economist Robert Nathan testified on behalf of the American 
     Business Press, it cannot and should not adopt, ``in the 
     guise of abstract economics, the profit-maximizing strategies 
     of private enterprise.''
       In September, Loren Smith, ``chief marketing officer'' of 
     the Postal Service, sent a form letter extolling the reform 
     proposals on cost-saving grounds, conceding that some 
     magazines would get hit with higher costs but suggesting that 
     even these might achieve savings through ``co-mailing.''
       Thus, when I appeared before the Postal Rate Commission in 
     October to make the case I have outlined above, I was not 
     surprised to be asked why the Nation couldn't qualify for the 
     lower rate category either by co-mailing with other weeklies 
     (time and logistics would make that impractical) or by 
     cutting isolated subscribers from our rolls (business and 
     social policy considerations would make that invidious).
       What I didn't expect was to be cross-examined (on colonial 
     history, yet) by counsel from both Time Warner and Dow Jones. 
     They made much of the fact that in the 1790s Congress had 
     singled out newspapers but not magazines for preferred 
     treatment. That is a neat debater's point, but as historian 
     Donald Stewart has documented, by far the greatest number of 
     newspapers in those days were weeklies, the line between 
     newspapers and magazines was murky at best (both were called 
     journals), and the highly partisan colonial press was the 
     equivalent of today's journal of opinion.
       When asked, inter alia, the source for my assertion that 
     Jefferson had nominated Paine for postmaster general, I 
     happily cited a Jan. 31, 1974, editorial commentary by Arthur 
     Schlesinger Jr. from the Wall Street Journal's editorial 
     page. This perhaps is what prompted counsel to ask, in the 
     three-and-a-half-hour colloquy's most esoteric query: Could I 
     name any job from which citizen Paine had not been fired? I 
     thought the question a non sequitur, but it did occur to me 
     that these too are times that try men's souls.

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