A Message from the Publisher
March 15, 2002

If response to previous Shell advertising on MotherJones.com is any indicator, then many readers will have concerns about the new Shell ads now running here. So I believe it's worth repeating Mother Jones' policies on accepting advertising and providing some background on how we came to them. Certainly we didn't get there without much thought and discussion.

As a matter of policy, Mother Jones will accept ads from most corners (though we reserve the right to reject ads that we believe are "false, libelous, exploitative or hateful"). The reason we take advertising at all, of course, is to help pay for the operating costs of a tenaciously independent, muckraking magazine and Web site. The percentage of our total revenues that come from advertising are, relative to a typical for-profit magazine, modest (12% in our case versus an industry average of about 50%), but the net contribution (more than half a million dollars) is quite significant to our budget. There is no confusion, however, about the Mother Jones' "bottom line"-- we're in business to produce great public interest journalism, no strings attached.

I would ask those who might see virtue in a more restrictive policy to consider that it would be very difficult for us, and I believe the wrong priority, to get into the business of making judgments about advertisers on behalf of our readers. Not only do we have every indication that our readers are plenty smart and skeptical, quite capable of making their own judgments about ad messages, we don't have the resources to do independent research on all who might want to advertise. Even if we did, there would be an impossible thicket of judgments to be made about what advertisers would meet any given set of standards: If Shell isn't acceptable, then what about ads from "responsible" mutual funds that have Shell in their portfolios? If record companies collude on the prices of CDs, should we take ads for their music? I don't believe it's a cop out to say that it's not our business to make those judgments for people. Our business is to provide them with extraordinary, fact-based reporting that they can use to make judgments for themselves.

It's worth considering also a general problem with ad censorship. The inclination on the part of many publishers and broadcasters to ban "controversial" messages tends, I believe, to restrict progressive messages far more often than it does corporate ones. (There are many examples of this, but the one closest to home for me has to do with ABC Radio refusing to air Mother Jones' ad about campaign contributions to Newt Gingrich and Dick Gephardt -- an ad based entirely on FEC records.) Paid ads from unions, protestors, gays and lesbians, Adbusters and Mother Jones are kept out of print and off the airwaves while almost anything goes for companies selling products. I personally don't go so far as to argue that the first amendment should be read to cover all commercial "speech," but I do believe that our politics are healthier with more voices, more perspectives, in any given debate, so I tend in general to favor fewer restrictions on information, even when it's paid for by big companies.

All of this is just so many words, of course, unless we put our ad money where our "mouth" is -- that is, into reporting. Readers don't have to look very far -- to Jan Deblieu's piece in the September/October 2001 issue -- to find a story that calls into question the goals and tactics of large oil companies. Arthur Allen's "Prodigal Sun" (March 2000) specifically notes BP's huge share of photovoltaic production, with environmental good guys opining on both sides of that development: it's a good thing because BP can take the technology to scale and help make solar cost-competitive with fossil fuels; it's bad because, with multinationals running the solar show, it's "merely another form of business as usual." I fully expect Mother Jones' editors to continue making judgments about coverage of Shell and BP and other players in the oil industry without regard to any advertising that appears on the Web site or in the magazine. And if people wonder where Mother Jones' values are, they should look at what we report.
--Jay Harris, Publisher