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Article: Posting Ideas.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- January 7, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Ben Franklin, who has been called the first citizen of print, established lower rates for newspapers when he was postmaster general (and arranged for magazines to be shipped free of charge by post road). Franklin, who founded one of America's first real magazines, The Saturday Evening Post, was simultaneously postmaster, printer and magazine maven, so he may be said to have had a conflict of interest. But George Washington also believed in the free distribution of newspapers (in many ways the equivalent of today's journals of opinion). Indeed, most of the Founding Fathers thought the circulation of ideas, information, opinion, expertise and argument in periodical form ...