politicnewsbusterinsiderpostreview: This has been a long time coming.

Monday, 30 August 2021

This has been a long time coming.

MoJo Reader,

I owe you all an update, and it starts with a huge and heartfelt THANK YOU before saying a bit about a recent article that labeled Mother Jones as "far left" to Newsmax's "far right" and asking what you make of it.

Leading with the gratitude: You stepped up at a moment when we really needed the Mother Jones community to have our back, and I'm happy to let you know that our big, uncertain fundraising campaign that wrapped up in July finished strong.

We didn't get all the way to our $350,000 goal, and we knew it would be a tall order when people were understandably paying less attention to the news and traffic was down for many outlets, including Mother Jones. But the roughly $330,000 you all pitched in—plus several hundred new monthly donations—helped kickstart our new, challenging fiscal year in a big way. And being our first significant fundraising push since Trump left office and Twitter (doesn't it feel like way more than seven months ago?), it's so encouraging to see support for MoJo's truth-telling, democracy-protecting journalism outlast the outrage and fear generated by his near-daily attacks that made work like ours feel so viscerally important.

Thank you to the upward of 8,000 of you who pitched in during our fundraising drive.

Thank you to the nearly 6,000 of you who support our reporting with a monthly donation.

Thank you to those who couldn't or didn't donate for bearing with us while we raised the money it takes to make our nonprofit journalism possible.

Everyone here at Mother Jones is so grateful for you: Readers who value our hard-hitting journalism that stands for something, who pitch in to support it from time to time, and who take our reporting out into the world so that, together, we can have an impact and create change.

Which brings me to that article I mentioned, from Axios, headlined "Boring News Cycle Deals Blow to Partisan Media." It's nothing new, finding Mother Jones trotted out in someone's argument about "partisan" news, usually without any kind of real analysis or data. Facebook even followed the faulty logic it to a T when deciding to suppress the reach of our journalism and boost right-wing junk sites.

But the (virtual) office chatter from this latest one inspired me to finally write about it for the letter to readers in the September+October issue of our print magazine. I mean, hell yeah Mother Jones has a point of view—but to put our actual journalism on the "far left" of a spectrum with Newsmax's disinformation as the antipode on the "far right," and, get this, Fox News merely as "right-leaning" didn't sit right. Not at all. (About Fox News: You'll definitely want to read Kevin Drum's new feature, "The Real Source of America's Rising Rage.")

So I reached out to the Axios journalists who called us "far left." They said they made their assessment "in consultation with news bias ranking service NewsGuard," which categorizes news sites based on its own proprietary definitions and whether outlets adhere to "basic standards of credibility and transparency."

Mother Jones checks out for NewsGuard and they categorize our work as following strong journalistic standards. They too label sites politically and call us "left-leaning." Newsmax, labeled "conservative," does not pass their smell test, getting rightfully dinged for publishing "false and unsubstantiated" claims.

The astute among you might notice a shift there: from NewsGuard's "left-leaning" to Axios' "far left." I asked the reporters why, and they emailed:

"Our categorizations of publishers are based on the point of view of the outlet, not the standard of journalism…We also used our own analysis for the groupings—as they are necessarily subjective, we can understand and respect if you disagree with the classifications."

"Necessarily subjective" assessments? In other words, an analysis of bias in the news that is based on…bias. Honestly, it's not even the words I object to—we'll keep doing the type of journalism you expect from us, and prognosticators can call us what they will.

But I do take issue with the journalistic standards at work: Axios treated the story in the way that conventional political reporting treats most issues, by creating a partisan frame that reflexively situates every debate and every voice on a two-dimensional right-to-left spectrum. That's how climate change and voting rights were framed as partisan issues, how Trump's republic-threatening corruption was positioned as a mere counterpart to But Her Emails. It's fitting each story into a preformatted box, and that's not a good way to get at the truth.

Especially now, when one end of that spectrum is dead set on dismantling democracy—as Ari Berman writes about in the upcoming fight around redistricting—and gerrymandering their way to power. Journalists have to do better. And at Mother Jones, we can do better thanks to support from readers like you who let us—who tell us to—call it like it is without fear or favor.

In my post, I share an example of David Corn showing us what eschewing that false equivalency looks like. He wrote, upon Donald Rumsfeld's death, about how the years after 9/11 were a "lonely time in Washington for those of us who questioned the wisdom, legality, morality, or strategic necessity of invading Iraq." So many pundits and journalists, including left-leaning ones, were cheering the buildup to war and ignoring the administration's deceptions that deserved way more scrutiny despite leaders from "both sides" largely being on board.

I hope you'll give it a read and that you'll let me know what you make of it in the prompt at the bottom of my post. Do you chafe at labels like "far left" to describe MoJo's mission-driven journalism? How would you describe our work compared to other journalism you follow? How do you describe your own personal views?

I'd love to hear from the Mother Jones community on this because none of the work we do would be possible without people like you who value our reporting and our voice, and help champion independent journalism that exists to make a difference no matter what others call it.

Thanks for reading, and for everything you do to make Mother Jones what it is.