Clara Jeffery

Editor in Chief

Since taking the editorial helm at Mother Jones in late 2006, Clara and her co-editor, Monika Bauerlein, have won two National Magazine Awards for general excellence, relaunched MotherJones.com, founded an nine-person Washington bureau, given birth, and forgotten what it's like to sleep. It probably doesn't help she's on Twitter so much.

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Clara Jeffery is co-editor of Mother Jones, where, together with Monika Bauerlein, she has spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by the addition of an eight-person Washington bureau, an overhaul of the organization's digital strategy and a corresponding tripling of traffic, and the winning of two National Magazine Awards for general excellence. Before joining the staff of Mother Jones, she was a senior editor of Harper's magazine. Ten pieces that she personally edited have been finalists for National Magazine Awards, in the categories of essay, profile, reporting, public interest, feature, and fiction. Works she edited have also been selected to appear in various editions of Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Science Writing. Clara cut her journalistic teeth at Washington City Paper, where she wrote and edited political, investigative, and narrative features, and was a columnist. Jeffery is a graduate of Carleton College and Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. Born in Baltimore and raised in Arlington, Virginia, she now resides in the Mission District of San Francisco with her partner Chris Baum and their three-year-old son, Milo. Their burrito joint of choice is El Metate.

Salute to James Ridgeway

A veteran MoJo reporter launches a new project

—By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery

| Tue Mar. 5, 2013 6:31 AM PST

Jim Ridgeway—who leaves MoJo's staff roster this week to become a contributing reporter—is, though he'd never put it this way, one of the legends of modern muckraking. Back in 1965 he helped establish the nascent field of consumer reporting when he revealed that GM had run a dark-ops campaign against a young Ralph Nader, whose book Unsafe at Any Speed detailed how automakers had knowingly sacrificed safety for sales. He went on to break more stories than we can count, digging into everything from energy politics to national security to the sex industry. MoJo co-founder Adam Hochschild remembers becoming a Ridgeway reader in 1968, when Jim and the late Andrew Kopkind started a newsletter called first Mayday and later Hard Times.

I still remember the yellow paper it came on, how eagerly I waited for each issue to arrive, and the pleasure of instantly knowing we shared a view of the world if I found that a new acquaintance was also a reader. It is sobering, in a way, to see how many of the problems Jim wrote about half a century ago are still with us. But it’s inspiring to see someone keep the faith all these years, especially someone who could have very easily had a successful and doubtless much more lucrative career writing unthreatening stories for the mainstream media. That, in fact, is where more than of few of the dissenters of the 1960s ended up.

Also among Ridgeway's admirers was Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Village Voice (where Ridgeway had become a staff writer) as part of his New York Magazine Co. acquisition in 1977.

[Read the full article]

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Mother Jones' David Corn Wins George Polk Award

—By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery

| Sun Feb. 17, 2013 10:02 PM PST

How is MoJo Washington Bureau Chief David Corn like Edward R. Murrow, Carl Bernstein, David Halberstam, Gay Talese, Fred Friendly, I.F. Stone, and Walter Cronkite? So many ways really, but the most notable today is that they have all won a George Polk Award, one of the most prestigious honors in journalism. Corn is the winner in the political reporting category for the 47 percent story—his revelation of a video documenting Mitt Romney's remarks at a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans were "dependent upon the government" and would never "take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

The Polk award, established in 1949 to honor a CBS correspondent murdered while covering the Greek Civil War, is given each year by Long Island University; this year's announcement commends Corn for the "years of high-impact journalism that helped lead him to the source of the recording," and for the "persistent digging and careful negotiation" that made the story possible. Other winners include the staff of Bloomberg News and the New York Times' David Barboza for uncovering corruption among China's elite; a team of McClatchy correspondents (including former MoJo contributor David Enders) covering the war in Syria; Sarah Stillman for her New Yorker piece on teen informants; Ryan Gabrielson of California Watch for a story on abuses in state clinics for the disabled; and the Frontline team behind the documentary "Money, Power, and Wall Street." For David and all of us at Mother Jones, it's a capstone for an amazing year and thrilling recognition for a project that has been widely credited with changing the course of the campaign.

No More Newtowns: What Will It Take?

How to change the unchangeable.

—By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery

| Mon Dec. 17, 2012 8:29 AM PST

A White House vigil on December 14

As we sat in horror Friday morning watching the details of the Newtown school shootings emerge, one question kept pushing through the anger, the grief, the ache to go hug our own kids: What would it take? What, after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, the Sikh temple shooting, and so many others, what would it take for the nation to grapple with the fact that our gun policy is the equivalent of leaving your gun cabinet unlocked with a "Murderers Help Yourself" sign on it? President Obama is right: We can't say we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, or that the politics are too hard, or that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom. But what then must we do?

Gun control may be famously intractable, but it doesn't take a genius to spot a few key correlations:

There are more guns out there, and fewer controls, than ever before.
There are a lot of people with mental-health problems, and services have been cut.
We have seen a record number of mass shootings this year—more than twice as many victims as in any previous year.
Even if you don't want to stipulate that 1 and 2 are causally related to 3, making it harder for dangerous people to get lethal weapons can only help.

Many Americans are in agreement, in principle, on point 4. So what would it take for that agreement to translate into action in the face of one of the most powerful lobbies the world has ever seen? What has it taken in the past to change the seemingly unchangeable, from slavery and child labor to the disenfranchisement of women and minorities?

[Read the full article]

Public Opinion Has Moved on Climate Change. Will Obama Follow—or Fiddle?

It's not jobs vs. climate. It's about a disaster economy vs. an adaptive one.

—By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery

| Mon Dec. 3, 2012 4:03 AM PST

Climate change's single appearance in the presidential debates was, well, anticlimactic. At the end of the second bout, after the candidates sparred interminably over whose love for fossil fuels was greater, moderator Candy Crowley said she'd decided not to call on an audience member who wanted to ask about global warming. "I had that question, all you climate change people," she said. "We just, you know, we knew that the economy was still the main thing."

And there it is, everything you need to know about the Beltway mindset in one compact little diss. Climate change has been demoted to special, you-people interest on the order of, oh, animal testing or nuclear disarmament. Important, sure, but not like the things that grown-ups care about, like whether America can afford another nickel at the pump. Or, for that matter, whether Joe Biden played dirty pool in the VP debate by blinding Paul Ryan with his 500-watt smile. In November, the liberal media watchdog Media Matters took the trouble to count up how much time the major networks (minus MSNBC) had devoted to the vice presidential grin: 91 minutes. Climate change, on those same networks, had taken up a grand total of 51 minutes in the preceding three months.

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Romney at Bain: How the Story Broke

What do we know about the candidate's departure from his company, and when did we know it?

—By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery

| Tue Jul. 17, 2012 3:30 AM PDT

Now that the question of Mitt Romney's departure from Bain Capital has blown up into a major subplot of the campaign season, it's worth reviewing how the controversy initially evolved—in part because, even as journalists (starting with MoJo's David Corn) have continued to uncover questions about the timing of Romney's retirement, professional fact-checking shops continue to maintain it's unfair to tie Romney to Bain's outsourcing investments.

June 20:The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" column gives the Obama campaign four Pinocchios—its worst rating—for an ad calling Mitt Romney a "corporate raider [who] shipped jobs to China and Mexico." WaPo notes that it is dinging the ad because two of the three outsourcing instances cited took place after Romney "stepped down from Bain to manage the Salt Lake City Olympics."

June 21: The Washington Post's Tom Hamburger reports that during Romney's tenure at Bain, the company "invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India."

June 29: Factcheck.org publishes its own analysis of Obama's outsourcing ads. It also takes the Obama campaign to task for "stretching" the truth; Hamburger's story, it argues, "revealed that Bain invested in companies that did outsourcing. But the outsourcing resulted in the creation of jobs here and abroad." Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter responds with a six-page letter defending the campaign's assertions.

July 2: Mother Jones publishes the first story reporting that Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings indicate Romney was involved with Bain beyond the point when he claims to have departed the firm, in 1999. In a piece on Bain's investments in a medical waste company that disposed of aborted fetuses, David Corn points out that there are

"…questions regarding the timing of Romney's departure from the private equity firm he founded…The SEC documents [reviewed by MoJo] undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999."

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