The US Post Office, Journalism, & Infrastructures of Democracy
United States democracy will fail without maintaining the physical infrastructures that undergird it. No, I do not only mean plumbing, roads and highways, electricity, or even the internet — I mean journalism and the U.S. Post Office.
While everyone panics about TikTok being shut down, I’m worried about the good ol’ United States Postal Service. There has been a recent flair up of the argument “we should run the Post Office like a business,” following our U.S. President-elect’s recent interest in potentially privatizing the service during his time in office.
It is true that the U.S. Postal Service is no money-maker. In December 2024, Reuters reported that the service “has lost more than $100 billion since 2007” and reported losing $9.5 billion in the most recent fiscal year.
But profit is not the point of an infrastructure. An infrastructure is meant to provide a stable foundation upon which innovations and ideas can be freely and openly shared. It is the technology of interconnections within elements in a larger system.
While this argument of privatizing the Post Office ran its course in the most recent panicked discourse of the day, I was working on a chapter I am co-authoring for a handbook on infrastructure communication that’ll come out in the next year or two. In the chapter, about supercomputing technologies and big data systems, I wrote about the need to protect the publicness of infrastructures. To make my point, I compared the US Post Office to its corporate competitors.
Yes, the Post Office seems slower, more inefficient — but only because that entity is bogged down by fairly serving the entire American public. The Post Office competitors are free from this burden, instead serving only people with sufficient money to be worthy of attention.
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To be clear, I believe we need both outlets in our society. Public infrastructures handle support and fairness necessary to balance the inherent inequality yet push toward progress provided by corporate competitors. As an infrastructure scholar, I simply want to note that the U.S. Post Office is one of the many invisible yet essential systems undergirding our entire way of life. In fact, it’s expressly mentioned in the document outlining our governmental system: “establish Post Offices and post roads” is stated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. In other words, it is not negotiable.
In arguments for and against privatizing the Post Office, often a major element left unspoken is the role of journalism in democracy — and the role of the Post Office in undergirding that journalism. In the early days of the United States, Paul Starr writes in Creation of the Media that “the Post Office was used to subsidize the press.” In other words, the postal system encouraged the press to become available widely and cheaply, encouraging citizen engagement. The Postal Service provided a key element of American institution-building that led us down the path to how we think about and use media today.
The flourishing of post offices in early America also led to increased literacy. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his famous report Democracy in America, noted that even rural, widely dispersed individuals were relatively informed readers. Such literacy did not come about by luck — but by the establishment of a hidden infrastructure system to support that behavior.
In Covering America, journalism historian Christopher Daly even describes the postal service as “one of the most significant” of early colonial systems that led to the innovative and widespread styles of American journalism that took hold in the centuries to come.
Modern contrarians would probably say, “But we have broadcasting and the internet now. We have evolved past needing the Postal Service to spread our journalism.” Well, broadcasting has always been more highly regulated by the government than the traditional press, and the internet has largely followed suit — and has been overrun by commercial interests. The key difference with both these systems is that they have not been protected as public infrastructures in the way the U.S. Postal Service has.
If broadcasting is in the hands of a manipulative government, and the internet is in the hands of manipulative corporations, then the old-fashioned but reliable U.S. Postal Service is all that remains for the people to communicate with one another and remain informed. It absolutely must be protected as the critical infrastructure system that it is.
I keep a copy of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights nearby my desk, as guiding documents to teaching and studying journalism as an American. Even as our infrastructures become more and more complex, I believe it is necessary to return routinely to the core elements behind the design of those systems. Even though they are invisible, they are entrenched in our philosophies and freedoms.
So sure, panic about TikTok. But also throw a little worry toward the U.S. Postal Service too every once in a while.
