Liza has a most excellent post up over at Culture Kitchen about the newest depredations of our corporate overlords.
Earlier this year, the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) rejected a postal rate increase plan offered by the U.S. Postal Service. Instead of implementing a plan that would spread equitably the rate hikes across all bulk mail clients, they opted to implement a modified version submitted by and partial to media giant Time-Warner Inc.
The new postal increase drafted by TimeWarner-AOL and approved by the PRC favors large bulk mail users like the magazine publishing divisions of TimeWarner-AOL by increasing the rate of small independent publishers by as much as 20%. Just to put things into perspective, for a publication like The Nation, this translates into paying $500,000 extra in postage yearly and in perpetuity (or until the next postal increase comes along).
As Teresa Stark put it in Disseminate Information, Protect Democracy, "While it is understandable that Time Warner would relish the idea of making it more difficult for new competitors, there is no reason to think that it is in the interest of the American people or the market economy".
This is bad every way you slice it. It protects the media oligopoly that already owns most of the content streaming into our brains from competition. It's bad for New York publishing. It's bad for independent publishing. The Nation is actually one of the most widely read of the political magazines, far outstripping tendentious fluff like National Review; if they're having problems, so will smaller publications. Independent publishing is being Wal-Martized.
This is a subject that offers some real political opportunities, because there is both a conservative and a Progressive case to be made in opposition to this latest bit of lobbyist-birthed pork. Conservatives should of right be concerned about the Friedmanesque freedom of the marketplace; if different actors in the market are treated differently based on their access, a market deformity results, limiting freedom of choice. Progressives can with equal validity point to our preference for small over large business, intellectual diversity over corporate monoculture, the implications for freedom of speech inherent in placing unequal burdens on smaller voices, and our deep distaste for the power of special-interest lobbyists.
The real irony is this: the old media sphere should, from a strategic perspective, be acting with more solidarity among its constituent parts. Carbon-based publishing as a whole may not be a tenable platform for very much longer. Killing off the smaller players, which is precisely what this amounts to, is merely going to drive more and more content onto the web. In the long run, the interests of Sports Illustrated and The Nation are very closely aligned; it's mystifying that the former would seek an advantage at the expense of the latter.
