ABSTRACT
I challenge anyone to demonstrate how democracy, in the United States or anywhere, can function without a citizenry that has ready access to information on virtually any subject, or without journalists who-rather than answer to the powerful-monitor them and tell us what they are doing. The originators of the United States were so clear on this that the only business guaranteed freedom, in fact the only business even mentioned, in the U.S. Constitution is the press. In early America the government subsidy for “media,” which in those days
meant newspapers, was considerable. It was commensurate with what modern democracies, other than America, spend on subsidies today. From [424, pp. 124-4] we read:
“How extensive were these subsidies? ‘Between 1792 and 1845,’ Culver Smith, a scholar
on the subject of subsidies, wrote, ‘the minimum charge for a letter ranged from six to
twenty-five cents, depending on the distance, but the maximum postage for a newspaper for
any distance was one and one-half cents.’ All the original research by the leading scholars
on the subject finds that newspapers and pamphlets accounted for around 95 percent of the
weight of the mail and less than 15 percent of the Post Office revenues.”
