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.”