Going postal: Washington's recurring attempts to squeeze small magazines out of business.

• Author: Navasky, Victor S.
• Position: Increased postal rates

When I heard recently about the United States Postal Service's plans to hold hearings on hiking rates for periodical class mail--the bulk postage class which gives lower postal rates to magazines--it reminded me of the day in 1995 when I returned to the offices of The Nation after an executive training program at the Harvard Business School. I had been editing the magazine for 16 years when Arthur Carter, then the publisher, made me an offer I should have refused and sold me the magazine for money I didn't have. As I was making the transition from editor to publisher, imagine then my consternation on returning from Harvard to discover that the postal service had recommended the abolition of the the discounted mail class for periodicals. All of my new financial projections, I feared, would go up in smoke. We survived that round, but now I am worried again. If implemented, higher postal rates, whether the originally rumored 15 percent increase or the recently rumored "6% solution," could bankrupt many small circulation magazines. Although any change in rates would probably not go into effect until 2006, it seems to me that now is the time for the independent press community and all those who care about the free flow of information to mobilize.

In the mid-1980s, at a conference on the role of journals of opinion that we co-sponsored with the journalism department at the University of Southern California, I made a point of putting postal matters at the top of the agenda, since keeping postage costs under control was one of the few issues around which journals of the left, right, and center might organize to mutual advantage. Robert Myers, a former publisher of The New Republic, told us about how, in the 1960s, he had put together a group of small-circulation magazines whose purpose was precisely to promote their common postal interests and which had even come up with a constructive proposal that he persuaded congressman Morris Udall to introduce as legislation: that the first 250,000 copies (in Udall's bill, it was only 25,000) of all publications be mailable at reduced rates. That way, smaller publications and journals with heavy content (perhaps for reasons of high seriousness) would get the largest proportional benefit, but all magazines would get some benefit. Alas, the legislation never got anywhere.

The most articulate opposition to government help for small magazines came, surprisingly, from our friend Michael Kinsley, who had already come out against the second-class mail "subsidy," as he called it, in a 1975 article in The Washington Monthly. At the conference he boiled his continuing objections down to three: Since the readership of journals like The Nation, The New Republic, and National Review were largely drawn from the highly educated elite, whose income was above average, the second-class subsidy therefore amounted to "a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich." Second, the camel's nose of government got into the tent of subsidizing opinion journals, Kinsley argued, content requirements would be inevitably hooked to the subsidy, raising profound First Amendment concerns; and, third, since opinion journalists were supposed to be watchdogs against special interests, it was wrong for us to become one ourselves. Kinsley observed that right-wingers should oppose such subsidies because they interfered with the free market, and left-wingers because they were regressive.

It was a virtuoso performance, and Kinsley, his forensic skills sharpened by hundreds of hours on "Crossfire," had my vote as captain of the debate team. But then Tom Silk, the lawyer who successfully defended Mother Jones when the Reagan administration challenged its nonprofit tax status, made a telling point. Some things are too important to leave to the vicissitudes of the market, like national defense and clean air--even Kinsley conceded that these two were "public goods"--and public discourse and the dissemination of...