It is a new day in America. Time to get back to an issue that once had a robust movement and needs revived: media reform.

Today I’m posting a video talk by Robert McChesney, co-founder of Free Press and co-author with John Nichols of Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America, and most recently authored Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy.  McChesney passed away last March, 2025.  Click here for more information about Robert McChesney.

I’ve posted on his work here previously but I stumbled upon this talk he gave in 2020, on the history of newspapers in America and why the post office is in the constitution, shared by Media and Democracy Project.  Still relevant today, more than ever. Here is a brief excerpt for followers that like to read. This seems really important and not widely known.

“You cannot be a free society without an independent press.

All the freedoms in the constitution were predicated on having a free press. But a free press meant a citizen has a right to have access to all sorts of information to make their own opinion and to consume that information and take advantage of it… it wasn’t just for rich people to make money.

If you study the founding of the country from Jefferson and Madison to Thomas Payne to Franklin, across the spectrum – that is arguably the single most important issue they dwell on. They said, if we’re going to have a free society where we actually let people vote and be in control of society we have to have an independent press…and so realizing it wasn’t going to happen on its own, they instituted a subsidy to make it easy to start newspapers. That was the postal subsidy.

Ironically, with all the attacks on the post office today, the post office was created primarily to speed up the development of a free press. Over 90% of the traffic of the post office was newspapers. Virtually every newspaper in America was delivered by the post office for the first hundred years in American history.

Mostly delivering newspapers, that’s what the post office did. The post office is in the constitution for this reason. One of the great issues is what to charge newspapers to be mailed. And they elected to basically subsidize it at an enormous amount to make it virtually free to distribute newspapers in the country because they, as Madison put it, any charge for postage would be a censorship because it would make it harder for some to publish. And to his credit, as he noted, the first papers to go under would be the dissident papers, the marginal papers. Those were exactly the papers you need to have in a free society in a democracy.

So this is something as Americans we should be proud of. This is part of our tradition. Because of the postal subsidies we had a newspaper system in the 19th century that was the envy of the world. Every great social movement was built around the ability to have newspapers that were sent virtually free through the mail. The abolitionist movement, the suffragette movement, the labor movement, every immigrant group. They depended upon those subsidies for their news media and all political organizing in the 19th century was done by newspapers and periodicals. That’s how you built a base and how you kept it. It was central to it.

The great heroes, Frederick Douglas, editor. Susan B. Anthony, editor. The political organizer was basically doing newspapers, reaching out to people. That’s what you were.

The subsidy of newspapers made it possible for ten times more newspapers to exist than would have been the case otherwise. The genius of the subsidy was, everyone got it, didn’t matter what the content was. The government didn’t pick winners and losers, everyone got it.

What happened by the end of the 19th century…”   – Robert McChesney

McChesney gave a lecture in Iowa City in 2014. He talked about why we need public funding for journalism.  I attended and wrote a post about it. Ironically, there was no local newspaper coverage.  McChesney was also an organizer of the National Conferences on Media Reform that were sponsored primarily by Freepress.net and used to happen every other year up until 2013. We need a renewed media reform movement in America.

Sign up for this virtual event by Media and Democracy Project. A Celebration and a Path Forward