Updates
News: Shameless self promotion.
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ABC radio talk-show host and good guy Jim Hightower agreed to do voiceovers of MoJo commercials. But before he could get a word out, the ABC Standards and Practicies Division (that's censor, to you) demanded revisions.
"Too controversial" and "defamatory" were the reasons given. Exactly what did ABC object to? The fact that MoJo named Republican Newt Gingrich and Democrat Richard Gephardt as both receiving $200,000 from the same PACs; that legislators "shake down" lawyers and lobbyists; that MoJo was first to uncover the truth about NASA's radiation experiments on unsuspecting civilians, about the Bush Dept. of Justics's shredding of important documents, and about the Ford Pinto's lethal defect.
Well, excuse us. Our standard practice is to run with the facts.
FotoFest
In November, at Houston's giant biennial celebration of photography, Mother Jones will award the Medal of Excellence to the top winner of its fifth annual documentary photography contest, sponsored by Leica. Ingo Gnther's "Mountains of Debt," will be on exhibition.
We came, we moshed, we conquered
MoJo was a big hit at Woodstock '94, if only for our moderately priced T-shirts (it got rainy and muddy out there). What we learned: The women who stopped by our booth seemed truly interested in saving the planet; the guys tended to ask, "So where are the 'shrooms?"
Mother-Inslaw
The longest-running government farce has to be Inslaw Inc.'s decade-long fight to force the U.S. Department of Justice to pay for the software it stole in 1983--software allegedly used for intelligence operations. As we've reported (May/June 1992, Jan./Feb. 1993), the Inslaw affair has been investigated eight times in 10 years. The only time the case was fully tried, in 1987, the judge issued a $7 million decision in Inslaw's favor; it was overturned on a technicality. A 1992 House Judiciary Committee report called for the DOJ to pay up and to appoint an independent counsel to investigate. So far, Janet Reno has refused. The DOJ's own report found no wrongdoing (what a surprise!); its review of Inslaw's rebuttal (conducted by then-Associate Attorney General Web Hubbell but released only last September) found the agency to have been above-board on everything as well. Now Rep. Charlie Rose, D-N.C., has introduced legislation to authorize the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to hear the case, "to address what is clearly one of the greatest wrongs ever inflicted upon American citizens by the federal government." Stay tuned.--Mary Fricker
MoJo makes news
Though our July/August cover story, "The GOP's Politics of Destruction," revealed the crafty machinations of Bob "we'll-obstruct-what-needs-obstructing" Dole and his Republican cohorts, it didn't deter him from warming up enough to the cover illustration (Dole as charging elephant) to sign it for his fans. . . . Adored in Japan--though still ignored in America: "Company Spies" (May/June 1994), about the CIA's targeting of foreign companies to glean trade and technology secrets for competing U.S. firms. Robert Dreyfuss' story has already been mentioned in major Japanese dailies. Now it's been reprinted in Esquire's Japanese edition. Dreyfuss has published a follow-up piece in the respected Japanese magazine Foresight, which included an interview with a former Tokyo-based CIA agent assigned to spy on Kyocera, a ceramics-technology firm on the cutting edge of automotive research.--Maya Sinha
