Since taking the helm at Mother Jones in 2006, Monika and her co-editor, Clara Jeffery, have won two National Magazine Awards, launched a nine-person Washington bureau, relaunched the website, given birth, and forgotten what it’s like to sleep.
Monika Bauerlein is co-editor of Mother Jones, where, together with Clara Jeffery, she spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by two National Magazine Awards for general excellence, the addition of a seven-person Washington Bureau, and an overhaul of the organization’s digital strategy that tripled MotherJones.com's traffic. Previously she was Mother Jones' investigative editor, focusing on long-form projects marrying in-depth reportage, document sleuthing, and narrative appeal. She has also worked as an alternative-weekly editor (at Minneapolis/St. Paul’s City Pages), a correspondent for US and European publications in Washington, D.C. and at the United Nations, an AP stringer, corporate trainer, translator, sausage slinger and fishing-line packager. She lives in Oakland.
That clinking sound you hear is the toasting at MoJo's offices at the news that our "Terrorists for the FBI" project has won the international Data Journalism Award in the investigative category. (Read it here.) "This story is, by far, the best investigative piece" among the finalists, the jury said. "It shows the significant effort required to gather large amounts of data, analyze it, and deeply investigate the individual cases. The analysis discovered a clear pattern on how the FBI generated terrorist plots from sting operations. The investigation proves that conclusion, not only with numbers, but also with in depth analysis and reporting in the field."
The result of an 18-month investigation by reporter Trevor Aaronson in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley, the story started from the observation that in many of the high-profile terror prosecutions—the Portland Christmas tree bomber, say, or the Bronx synagogue bomber—it was actually a government informant who provided the jihadist rhetoric, the plot, the money, and even the explosives or weapons. Curious about this pattern, Aaronson reviewed every terror prosecution since 9/11—cases involving 508 defendants in all—and scoured thousands of pages of court documents. Aaronson's data were refined, expanded, and comprehensively fact-checked by a team of reporters and editors, then turned into an online database and compelling visualizations by MoJo's developers and designers.
Among the investigation's findings:
Nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violations. (For more on the details of those 508 cases, see our charts page and searchable database.)
Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants. Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.
With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings. (The exceptions are Najibullah Zazi, who came close to bombing the New York City subway system in September 2009; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian who opened fire on the El-Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles airport; and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.)
In many sting cases, key encounters between the informant and the target were not recorded—making it hard for defendants claiming entrapment to prove their case.
Terrorism-related charges are so difficult to beat in court, even when the evidence is thin, that defendants often don't risk a trial.
You can analyze the data yourself (parsing them by, say, state or alleged terrorist group affiliation), view fact sheets on individual defendants, and peruse our interactive charts. And, of course, you can read the other stories in our "Terrorists for the FBI" package, including a profile of radical-turned-informant Brandon Darby, and an investigation of the FBI's "proxy detention" program under which Americans are interrogated, and allegedly tortured, by overseas security forces.
This was a major endeavor for Mother Jones—unlike some of our larger peers, we don't have a roomful of computer-assisted-reporting specialists. Instead, we relied on equal parts shoe-leather and innovation; to be honored for it by our global peers is a dream come true. Follow us at @MonikaBauerlein and @ClaraJeffery as we tweet the World News Summit from Paris, drunk with excitement (and, um, surely nothing else).
Hello dear readers! Yes, it's fundraising time, and we encourage you to donate a few dollars to the Mother Jones Investigative Fund to support independent, investigative journalism.
Unlike NPR, we can't hold your commute hostage to our pleas for money. But what we can do is remind you of some compelling reasons to part with a few of your hard-earned bucks. Ready?
12) Because our yearlong investigation of the FBI's domestic informant program was so good, it's been picked up by all the big papers (though not always with credit).
13) Because remember the whole exploding Ford Pinto thing? Yeah, that was us.
14) Because we pay our interns, and don't pit them against one another in a weekly acid-saber-fight cage match where only the triumphant one is allowed food.
15) Because we'll help you know the difference between Newt and Schrute.
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To many, the shutout of women in those categories was a perfect indicator of the byline gap that plagues magazine journalism—particularly when it comes to ambitious narrative reporting and nonfiction. It's a subject we've been obsessed with for years (read more here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here), and one that got special attention when a group called VIDAbegan focusing on the problem among magazines known for fiction, book reviews, and literary non-fiction. The upshot: Some of the most prominent magazines in America had byline counts that continue to be discomfiting.
MoJo reporter Adam Weinstein had been at work on an interview with Erin Belieu, one of the founders of VIDA, when the outrage over the ASME nominations began. So he called her up to get her response (read the full interview here):
Not to denigrate the genuine accomplishments of the small number of women who were nominated, but it's interesting that they're acknowledged for what [GOOD magazine executive editor] Ann Friedman identifies as "service" writing—the vast majority of their nominated articles concerning "women's issues"—on breast cancer, under-aged brides, women's body image. These are all worthy subjects and the nominations are well deserved, but it does beg the question: Do women journalists only want to write about "women's issues"? Or is that the only thing for which they're commonly rewarded? Why is it that the nominated men wrote about such a variety of topics that don't seem to be strictly defined by the equipment they sport from the waist down? A friend of mine defines this kind of intellectual segregation as the "tits and nether bits" ghetto, a place in which women only speak to other women. Meantime, men are allowed and encouraged to speak to whomever they want.
Illustration: Steve BrodnerPity the poor essayist, trolling around for the quintessential anecdote for how the GOP has needlessly alienated soccer/security/nom du jour moms in its quest to brand anyone who has ever used contraception with a scarlet S. Do you revisit Rush calling Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" for daring to talk about the need for contraception, including for non-sex-related medical uses? Yes, perfect, though perhaps a better example of what happens when a Beckian blatherskite forgets that advertisers are a fickle lot. Maybe the time when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) refused to have Fluke—or any woman—appear before his all-male subcommittee on the bishops-versus-birth control fight? Eh, a little procedural. How about the zygote-personhood bills that prompted Oklahoma state Sen. Constance Johnson to offer up an amendment making it illegal to ejaculate anywhere outside a woman's vagina? Love the nod to Reese Witherspoon's "reckless abandonment" lawyering in LegallyBlonde, but then again, can we privilege that over Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner's measure to require Viagra users to get a psychological exam? As Turner so thoughtfully noted, "The men in our lives, including members of the General Assembly, generously devote time to fundamental female reproductive issues. The least we can do is return the favor." And yet, surely props must go to Virginia state Sen. Janet Howell, who kicked off the good-for-the-gander trend back in January, on the occasion of a bill to require women seeking abortions to endure a transvaginal ultrasound: She offered an amendment to force men wanting Viagra to get a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test. It failed by just two votes.
Two votes. In pre-Fluke January. In Virginia. That, and the slow boil over attempts to redefine rape and defund Planned Parenthood, should have been warning enough for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett to keep his yap shut. But no—Corbett doubled down on transvaginal ultrasound by saying, "You just have to close your eyes." True, he didn't add "Just sit back and enjoy it." And he delicately qualified his support of the mandatory procedure "as long as it's on the exterior and not the interior," though it's perfectly clear that under the bill, "interior" is what most women would get.
This weekend we're trying something new in our commenting system. This only affects you if you have been posting as a "guest;" if you normally sign in with Disqus (which powers our commenting system) or your Mother Jones ID, nothing changes. If you were using the "guest" feature, you can now sign in via Disqus, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID. You can also create a commenter identity in the Mother Jones system here. As before, your information will not be disclosed; see Disqus' privacy policy here and Mother Jones' here.
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Beyond the blustering on Benghazi and the budget sequester, there are many serious issues facing the nation. Climate change, gun violence, immigration reform, drone warfare, human rights—Mother Jones is dedicated to serious investigative reporting on all of these. But we need your help. We're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and our work is mostly funded by donations. Please donate 5 or 10 bucks to the Mother Jones Investigative Fund today to turbocharge our reporting and amplify our voice. Thanks!
