Writing in the November bulletin of the North Dakota Newspaper Association, Executive Director Cecile Wehrman said:
“Well, it was nice while it lasted.
“For several weeks after the postal roundtable held in Grand Forks on Aug. 26, I was getting a few messages from eastern (N.D.) newspapers expressing surprise that they were suddenly getting their newspapers (delivered) on time.
“Of course, it didn’t last.”
Wehrman, who is an accomplished journalist and former publisher/editor of weekly newspapers, was commenting on the ever-worsening level of service to North Dakota’s weekly newspapers from the United States Postal Service. (It’s the same for daily papers.) Her column was headlined “Postal issues still not resolved” — an understatement if ever there was one.
At a time when community newspapers that have been mainstays of towns and counties for generations are struggling because of changes in the rural economy, USPS is making a challenging situation worse. In some cases, shoddy service from USPS has hastened, or even guaranteed, a newspaper’s demise.
Weekly newspapers depend on the postal service to actually provide the service it is required to provide. Instead, deliveries are unreliable, unpredictable and sometimes so late that the content of the newspapers — news and advertising — is meaningless. Some advertisers have demanded refunds from publishers because ads didn’t get to readers in a timely fashion. Think of what that does to the bottom line of a small newspaper that counts on every advertising dollar.
So what’s wrong with USPS?
These days, just about everything. But at its core is a long-festering systemic fiasco that dates to the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act that reduced USPS from a cabinet-level department to an independent quasi-business agency. It’s an incompatible hybrid of half-baked privatization and fumbled government obligation. It was a mistake of historic proportions, and the years since have proved as much. It was an ideology-driven congressional manipulation of the constitutional mandate (Article I, Section 8), which gives Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads.
The doctrine of universal service (getting first-class mail to you wherever you are) is what the framers envisioned. They did not enable a system that was going to be profitable commerce. The universal service obligation is not a profit model; and attempts since 1970 to make it so have failed.
The USPS is a mess for many reasons: union intransigence, competition, the digital revolution, mismanagement, political interference and corruption. Nonetheless, mail delivery should be adequately federally funded, not dependent on a demonstrably unworkable profit pretense. It’s a constitutional obligation, much like providing for the common defense and the general welfare.
Do we expect the Department of Defense to make a profit? Do national parks pay for themselves? The interstate highway system? Farm subsidies? Congress appropriates funds to meet those obligations. It should be the same for the postal service. As the Constitution directs: deliver the mail — and those weekly newspapers — everywhere and on time. Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster and a weekly newspaper owner, would expect no less.
